Ronan Point: a 50 year building safety problem - BBC Newsnight 

I learned this today but that was Absolutely shocking 😮

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As a Yank, I'd always ass-u-med (apparently wrongly) that the UK had powerful unions during that post-war period, and Labour Party sponsored laws to support said unions (and workers)... no?

@@MajorCaliber Unions look after workers' rights and conditions, not the things they produce (other than whether they are a health and safety threat to the workers). If the pay and conditions were reasonable, they wouldn't get involved and let's be honest, everyone was at that time excited by this burst of building new homes for the slum dwellers.

Modular construct is having a resurgence and can actually be done safely, but you can not just leave out all the metal and stuff the walls full of newspaper and hope it doesn't collapse.

Bodget n Leggit Ltd

But there were no seams, that's the whole point.

That sounds safer than this, but any modern concrete structure has a limited lifespan and when a structure this tall fails, it will likely be a catastrophe. It's distressing to think of all the mid-rise concrete towers, built in the 30 years after WWII, which will have to come down one way or another in the next 30 to 60 years.

Many French blocks used Sectra - a very strong and good but expensive method of construction at the time. The have internal steel reinforcements and a special method of drying the concrete after it has been poured over the rebars. Safe as houses mate.

This man was THE authority on these buildings-it was HIM that devoted his life to the safety of the people living in them. What he is saying was perfect sense to me, in other words, BECAUSE they are still standing they DO look safe, we would have no reason to believe otherwise, but the truth is very different. He mentions later that, and i quote “it is LUCK that has gotten us here”, he’s right, but i’m sure if there had been a severe fire or a truck had hit one of these buildings, things would’ve been rather different. Even when they are being demolished they are very dangerous, the untied walls have a nasty habit of ‘pancaking’ even when being taken down slowly and carefully.

This is often the direct broadcast sound before "finalized" for actual broadcast. I have much material from 1990 after fall of the iron curtain from East Germany that surfaced from archives that have the same 100% Stereo panning. During one of those, they show an East German grocery store with customers, and the narrator was on the left, but you could still hear the carts and customers on the right. If you wish to go back to the "natural" sound, just mute the left channel. This way you can watch a preview while still be able to mute one track. The good thing is that you can have either the voice track (left) or the actual filmed sound (right) extracted even after merging - albeit monaural each of course.

Sorry, I meant to say 'call out the BS.'

@Daniel Eyre The joys of socialism.

@Daniel Eyre It has everything to do with socialism.

@Daniel Eyre Yes it does. The two are mutually dependent. Great Britain was not destroyed by the Nazis, it was and is still being destroyed by Socialism. Shoddy work, slipshod manufacturing, careless construction, inferior materials. Socialism infects, corrupts consumes and destroys everything it touches. I was there, I was subjected to it, I saw it, I experienced it.

I suppose you missed the part where the substandard construction work was done by a private company, lol.

@@Millenia3D the constructors were subcontracted to the city. The city is its own contractor. The contractor is responsible for approval and inspections. Huge payoffs for turning a blind eye. Where have you been? Your ignorance is staggering.

@@saintmartins6729 Darling, you are mixing up social housing with socialism. This proves your own ignorance.

@@walterrudich2175 Social housing is part of socialism. Uniformity. State ownership. Regulation and Limitation of choice, It's a custodial view that crushes everything good about being alive. Socialism is a death sentence and it has destroyed every society that has adopted it in any form whatsoever. I am not your darling.

@@saintmartins6729 You are so out of line, darling.

Well, across the nationwide sample set of 1,585 such LPS-built towers, yes, it does somewhat nullify the urgency, and would seem to ignore the *in-built safety factor* that all such "systems" are designed with. Without dusting off ye olde undergrad Prob-Stats text, it seems IMprobable that across tens of thousands of flats, and hundreds of thousands of residents, over the *span of 50+ years*, that ZERO people have had a gas explosion or fully-involved fire, that NONE of these towers has ever suffered a collision from a heavy rubbish truck/delivery lorry/etc... not even a single collision from a General Aviation "aeroplane" in that foggy climate?... ... along with the inescapable (and cynical) fact that a whole new crop of "cowboy" remediation companies are, once again, picking the public's purse to "correct" the more publicized of the issues. As for Grenfell, I'm not clear on what "system" it was built with but: a) they certainly DID completely evacuate many surrounding buildings during and for days after the fire; b) as far as mild-steel structural connections/joints being weakened to the point-of-failure by fire, Grenfell definitely passed the "acid test" on THAT one! Bottom line: if we believe that exploited underpaid Ronan worker, that only a paltry 20% of bolts were installed ON RONAN, then the "Passage of Time" suggests that the vast majority had more like 50% -80% installed, and that turns out to be "enough". (Still WAY TOO SHODDY for my tastes... would not buy/rent!)

Grenfell seems to have been built using similar techniques to modern buildings, not LPS. While towers like Ronan Point were seemingly built using LPS(large panel systems) prefab panels(and with poor design & construction) for every wall & floor, so much more prone to progressive failure/collapse. The Grenfell architect said '..the tower had been designed with attention to strength, following the Ronan Point collapse of 1968, "and from what I can see could last another 100 years." He described it as a "very simple and straightforward concept. You have a central core containing the lift, staircase and the vertical risers for the services and then you have external perimeter columns. The services are connected to the central boiler and pump which powered the whole development and this is located in the basement of the tower block. This basement is approximately four metres deep and in addition has two metres of concrete at its base. This foundation holds up the tower block and in situ concrete columns and slabs and pre-cast beams all tie the building together"' The age of the buildings isn't in itself the issue, it's the methods that were common around that time. The particular method that seems to have been common in the UK for buildings like Ronan Point was the 'Bison industrialised building system': 'In tower blocks over 12 storeys in height, all of the walls were loadbearing - external and internal. Whilst there were no partition walls, the internal walls were still thinner at 6 inches in thickness. Two-bedroom flats could be constructed out of 21 pre-cast concrete pieces. The bathroom and toilet elements could be constructed from a similarly few number of pre-fabricated pieces. The lift shaft and staircases could be constructed out of pieces that were 3 storeys high. The method was limited in that it was only really practical for two and three-bedroom flats.'

@@MajorCaliber Grenfell Tower is not an LPS structure. It was constructed in 1972 and complied to the building standards of 1970 which were changed from those for Ronan Point.

@@hbrack7031 Yes, according to Mr. Monotone's quote from the Grenfell architect, it would seem that Grenfell Tower was NOT LPS, but mostly cast-in-place concrete, with limited use of pre-cast beams. BUT... the (in)famous Robin Hood Gardens was also erected in 1972, and it DID use an LPS system (from The Netherlands, IIRC). There's nothing INHERENTLY wrong with Large Panel Systems--you just have to *assemble them properly!*

@@hbrack7031 Anyway, the issue at Grenfell was NOT the concrete, nor how the concrete got there, but rather the bureaucratic INSANITY of gluing *highly flammable cladding* to a building that was inherently fire-resistant to begin with, just to make it "pretty". Some ruined careers, and horse-whipping, are in order here.

Harsh sentence by a treacherous judge. This is Britain, not the middle east!

no im christianophobic. bruv.

There's no political solution, collapse the government, race_war NOW!!!!!

BigNig No.

Not to be forgotten BigNig Tommy Robinson pled guilty.

Oh fuck off. He pled guilty u fucking chav.

There's no political solution, collapse the government, race_war NOW!!!!!