Unacceptable Solutions Ep 1: And Now Our Beds Are Burning?
Learn more about the origins of the cladding crisis and the shocking statistics of the 60 cladding fires we studied. To borrow from the Midnight Oil anthem for aboriginal land rights, ‘How do we sleep while our beds are burning?’
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Unacceptable Solutions Episode 1: And Now Our Beds Are Burning?
As horrible as it was, you would be forgiven for thinking that the deadly Grenfell fire of 2017 was a one off and that the product giving rise to it is relatively new. Neither could be further from the truth.
The cladding crisis has its origins in Germany in the 1960’s when aluminum panels were used to sandwich a polyethylene core material to make bed mattress support panels. Other uses for what have become known as aluminum composite panels or ACP were soon found including using it as a substitute for masonry for covering the external walls of buildings. ACP is lightweight, easy to cut and bend and of course less expensive that the alternatives. It is also shiny and became terribly fashionable, there’s just one problem, according to fire engineers, one square metre of ACP burns like 5 and a half liters of petrol.
And somehow 50 years later this deadly product covers buildings worldwide including residential high rises, the fires have begun and people are losing their lives and others, their minds with worry. To borrow from the Midnight Oil anthem for aboriginal land rights, ‘How do we sleep while our beds are burning?’
To find out just how deadly this product is I studied more than 60 cladding fires worldwide and can conclude that death by cladding is certainly not a one-off event. In fact, over one in five of the 60 reported cladding fires from 1990 to 2020 resulted in fatalities. 13 of the 60 fires reported have resulted in a total of 189 deaths worldwide to date including
- 17 in Dusseldorf in 1996
- 58 lives lost in Shanghai in 2010
- 16 in Azerbaijan in 2015 and
- 72 in the London Grenfell fire of 2017.
40 % of the fires have resulted in injuries. The total injured number 443 from 24 of the 60 fires.
The most fires have occurred in the United Arab Emirates where there have been 17 fires in the last 30 years including incredibly one building called The Torch that has burnt twice. Europe has had 13 fires and China has had 8. Australia has had just 2.
Perhaps it is the way, and the speed with which ACP fires spread that the property damage toll is as bad as it is. On average 19 floors have been damaged in each fire where property damage figures have been available. The Lacrosse fire in Melbourne damaged 15 floor in just 18 minutes.
To be fair, the fires I have studies are those reported in the press and may have a bias toward English speaking media and more serious of fires. There is more work to be done by academics in this area to discover the extent and any evident trends of the fires.
In the way of these things, hard heads will argue that’s these numbers are insignificant compared to the extensive use of the product and the relatively high cost of remediation. Removal and replacement can cost anywhere between $20,000 to $100,000 per apartment depending on how much of the product has been used, how it has been fixed and the access requirements for its removal.
To that pragmatic economic argument, residents with combustible cladding might say what price do you put on my life? The relatives and friends of those that died In Grenfell Towers can answer that question. There the installation of combustible cladding rather than noncombustible cladding reportedly saved 293,000 pounds. That’s a price of just 4,069 pounds or $ 7209 .50 for each of the 72 that died. How do you sleep knowing that?
