I feel like it is bizarrely appropriate that the outcome of rampant corner-cutting was an actual corner of the building falling off. I mean, a screenwriter who pitched that idea would get thrown out of the producer's office. Also, I just realized that this was basically the literal embodiment of the second bid in the Monty Python architect sketch. "Well, as long as the tenants are of light build and relatively sedentary, I think we're onto a winner here!"
Now you have me wondering if Monty Python fashioned that skit after this disaster????????????????????? Not sure when that skit aired. Love Monty Python by the way. John Cleese is by far one of my favorite actors! Department Of Silly Walks has to be one of my favorites of all time!! LOL!!
@@MelodyMLucianoNorris-qe8lc Well, I got curious and looked around a bit, and according to Wikipedia, the sketch was recorded in September 1970. With that, it seems extremely likely to me that it _was_ a direct reference.
Really? Ever seen Towering Inferno? The fire in that film was caused by dodgy wiring. It would be interesting to know if such a fire was actually caused by this in real life. Many multi storey blocks of flats had gas supplies removed after the incident at Ronan Point. However, I lived in a 12 storey block of flats in North Manchester, from 1964 to 1981, and we had a gas supply to our cooker. I even remember in the early 1970s, all the burners on our cooker had to be replaced by ones suitable for North Sea Gas (methane), which had a flame speed different to town's gas (a 50:50 mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen).
The stove who's gas caused the collapse survived without damage? Maybe these stove manufacturers should try their hand at building construction. They seem to have the sturdiness on lock already.
Experts wanted Roman Point to be demolished for a long time. When it was finally dismantled in 1986, it was discovered thai it was in way worse condition then they predicted (massive cracks in lower floors).
The fact that the council didn't carry out remedial works is of no surprise to us. We live in the UK and used to live in a 19-storey Tower Block in the Midlands. It had 114 flats. I was in a 1-bed flat and one day when my window was open, it was caught by the wind and slammed shut, cracking the window from top to bottom. I reported it, and reported it, then finally a worker turned up and said, 'Oh, wrong window.' He had been told that it was the reinforced glass on my balcony that was broken. Later that day, I finally had it replaced. However, my husband had one better than this. He lived in a 2-bed flat in the same block, just on a higher floor, and when he moved in there was a large crack in the glass panel that surrounded the balcony. He was on the 11th floor, which was literally 100ft (he measured it whilst drunk one evening using a ball of string with a nut tied on the end, then used a tape measure) He reported the crack. Nothing happened. He reported it a further 8 times. Finally, he woke up one morning after a windy night and found the very large piece of reinforced glass that spanned approximately 50% of the balcony, lying inside the balcony. He went to the council offices again, and this time he reported that half of the glass was now in the balcony. If the rest fell out and happened to fall down, it would kill someone as it would come down like a guillotine. He also stated that if it was not fixed by the end of the day, he would be ringing the local newspaper to tell them all about it. Strangely, the council suddenly became VERY efficient and the glass was replaced the same day. The workman who came round was laughing at the level of panic he had created at the council offices. We ended up living together in his flat and we had various issues. The lighting was out on the floor around the lift and stairwell. There was debris, faecal matter and used needles in the stairwell and a mega build up of pigeon muck at the ground floor exit door. We had reported these things to no avail. There was even a concierge office, and they had been reporting these issues also to no avail. So we contacted the local Wolverhampton Express & Star and a reporter came round. The Tower Block was called Wodensfield Tower, however, we called it Toilet Towers and this title appealed to the reporter who took photos and spoke to us. Our story ended up on the third page with a picture of us in the stairwell alongside the rubbish and graffiti, and the headline was Toilet Towers. The article was a fair size. Miraculously, the council came round in very short order afterwards, replaced the lighting, cleaned the stairwells and removed the pigeon muck..... Amazing what a little bit of bad publicity can do isn't it?
We live in a council house in the south east and it's just as bad here. We've had non stop problems since we moved in, from simple things like cracked windows to the fact our front door sometimes just doesn't open, like you push the handle down and it won't budge. It's a serious fire risk and yet, 2 years on, we're STILL trying to get someone to come out and fix it.
i wish bad publicity worked to pressure negligent building owners/managers today, but it doesn't seem to do so. your story does give me a little hope, and i hope the both of you are doing well!
I laughed at that part of the video because I am such a sleeper. I once slept through a tornado. I was also blissfully unaware of a runaway dump truck that rolled down a hill by my house before demolishing a rock wall in my front yard. Not even the police responding to the truck incident were enough to wake me up. So yeah, that is totally something that would happen to me.
When my dad was a kid, he fell off of a bunk bed & broke his nose. He slept through the whole thing. He didn't even know it had happened until the next morning.
The makers of the stove is a for profit company who NEEDS to have a good reputation to stay in business. The building's owner was the government. They don't NEED to have a good reputation they have no competition!
Practicality isn't the concern when they build these but rather money. It's cheaper to rebuild every fifty years than it is to make things properly. It's also about passing costs onto future generations instead of investing in the future, a problem that is particularly important nowadays.
Find these an easier listen. I find Plainly Difficult’s speech pattern hard to listen to. He’s a native English speaker, as am I, but puts in strange pauses and commas that don’t belong where he puts them. Maybe I am just being petty.
@@sparky4878 Yes, I stopped watching him for the same reason. It seems to have gotten worse over the last several months, I think he's taking less care to redo recordings and edit them properly. There was one particular video where he misspoke and corrected himself while quoting someone involved in the accident so that it sounded like *they* were the one who misspoke and that that error was a contributor to what happened. It took me a while to figure out that he simply hadn't bothered to re-record to fix it.
Taylor-Woodrow, the building contractor, could (and probably should) have had a least a measure of liability based on the spectactularly poor workmanship. This isn't "scapegoating" - it's not far off corporate manslaughter. The local authority, however, might also bear some responbility based the fact that it was the responsible client for the work. This was not a "government-made" construction - it was a local authority managed job. These days I suspect (or at least hope) the outcome would have been different. It is important to point out that a huge proportion of large scale building projects are built in this way - effectively by kit. The specific engineering issue in these early-ish examples was that the load bearing element was the external wall rather than a steel frame.
Lived in the sister block Gannon Point from 1971 to 1985, someone sneezed on the 1st floor, someone on the 22nd floor said bless you! In high winds you could feel the building sway!
Those high rise flats are supposed to sway in high winds, I remember staying in a Victorian holiday let on the Kent coast in the 1990s [3 floors] during a storm the light fitting were swaying and the building was moving
Swaying is a good thing, even though it feels weird. I knew a guy who was in the Transamerica skyscraper in San Francisco during an earthquake. It stayed up because of the properties that let it sway. That said, no thank you.
I remember as a child being driven past this block in the weeks after it happened, I was 9 but still remember feelings of horror when seeing the collapsed floors. I find the fact that the lifespan of these buildings was only intended to be 60 years anyway appalling. Why all that effort and expense for such a short time when houses can be built to last centuries. I would rather live in a tent than a tower block, no matter how well built it was!
In former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, millions of people live in buildings like these, to make this even worse all of former Yugoslavia and parts of former Soviet Union are an earthquake zone. There was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Zagreb, Croatia in 2020 and these types of buildings were severely damaged, but were repaired and put back in use. I wonder how long will they last...
Modern buildings are not designed to last too long now. It is not cost effective. A building that can last for centuries is expensive to build and will most likely be demolished long before it is worn out. These buildings were intended to have been replaced long before they were life expired.
@@ptonpc "These buildings were intended to have been replaced long before they were life expired." Indeed. And that's a major problem with our current use-and-throw-away mentality. Yes, building a house that will last is more expensive, but in the long run it's cheaper than building, demolishing, building, demolishing, etc... We ought to be planing for the long term sustainability of our society, not for a quick buck here and now.
@@joshuabessire9169 that's why we get tricked by the regime all the time, because everyone is drunk all the time. Too drunk to care that a nursery just got attacked
Doesn't surprise me, Newham Council are terrible even to this day. I was under them when I was a student, they were so bad. Not only were all the houses we were shown to stay in falling apart because they hadn't bothered to maintain them, but they also tried to put me and my student friends in prison because we hadn't paid council tax that we were exempt from. This was because they'd only bothered to pick up half of the student register at the Uni. They never apologised and the threatening letters kept coming for a month after they'd acknowledged and accepted that we were students and thus, tax exempt.
Newham is still a complete hole. Probably the most deprived Borough in London even now and has escaped basically all forms of serious gentrification. Ronan Point is (was) in what's now Canning Town and that is not anywhere you want to end up.
Im calling bullshit on that. Even if he somehow landed flat, which judging by the way it collapsed is incredibly unlikely. Then given that the only bedrooms to collapse where at the very top alone makes it impossible to believe. But lets pretend somehow maybe he had a bed in the living room and it hit the wind just right and he landed flat, he would immediately be crushed by falling debris.
@@bradsanders407 not everything is BS, strange things happen that you can't explain. I hope one day they happen to you where you try to explain to people and they doubt you.
He was lucky that guy in. Tte bed glad he survived, i bet there's been tonnes of jokes about it my mate said the bed he was in was made by flying giny company 😅,
The Danish firm that invented LPS, Over Arup, never intended it to be used for buildings over 4 storeys because that was the legal limit in Denmark at the time. Another cause of the collapse was thr use of sea-dredged aggregates I'm making the concrete: the salt in thr concrete corroded the rears in the concrete and weakened them to the point of uselessness. My grandfather was one of the dockers who stopped work and went to the site to offer help as rescue workers. The press reported their action as "Another dock strike"!
During the building of this and other tower blocks in Newham, the most familiar sight on the boroughs roads were the lorries belonging to the Hoveringhsm company, a business that specialised in the sale of "sea-dredged aggregstes"(sand and ballast dredged from the sea) to the construction industry. The high salt content of these materials proved deadly to the iron rears in the reinforced concrete , and contributed to the collapse of Ronan Point, necessitating the eventual evacuation of this and many other blocks.
Did I read this right? The idea that salt-laden material (from the sea!) mixed with steel makes it rust much faster just never crossed their minds?? Did they share a single brain cell between them?
The whole purpose of constructing these ugly buildings is to pack away and contain large amounts of a given nation's poor, disabled and immigrants while ignoring the issues that contribute to these people existing in the first place... very sad situation. In America they used to spray toxic chemicals on these tower blocks to test on the predominant racial minorities living there. In Canada, tower blocks are largely inhabited by transients who struggle to hold down a job and are often addicts or mentally ill. A lot of "newcomers" are dumped there, sometimes multiple families crammed into one apartment unit. These buildings almost always have issues with rats, mold, insects, privacy violations, weather damage and drugs... a good study on why tower blocks don't work to save lives is the Cabrini-Green Housing Project in Chicago... tall high-rises in urban areas have become symbolic of modern segregation, government corruption, failed socialism and the inherent dignity that comes with owning one's own private property, something that is blatantly lacking in the class divide created by tower block living.
Thank you for all your investigative work on this, and just reporting it without the hype and drama so often seen with other sites. We really appreciate your hard work. 🇦🇺👍
As I traveled home to central London from Dagenham late on that fateful day, I saw this damage. I was so astonished that I parked my car and stood with others in disbelief and shock. Thank you for telling the story behind what could have been a major tragedy. Tho given the recent fire deaths in a London tower block - “When will they ever learn?”
Thanks for posting this video THE DAY AFTER I MOVED INTO A HIGH-RISE!!! All levity aside, another disaster explained, without fanfare or sensationalism. This is why we love your channel.
@@samholdsworth420 I'm rarely home, and the noise is kinda reassuring. Lived in the country a few years ago, found the silence unsettling. At least shouting, traffic, gunshots and sirens are reminders that there are other people close by.
@@andygarside2418So you’d rather listen to shouting, traffic and gunshots than birds/rain/wind? The best part of living in the country is not having to deal with millions of other people. FUCK living in a tower block.
@@yungamuraiwe're all different, buddy! The country smells like horse shit, the people tend to be nosey wankers and the shops are a 20 minute drive away. I'm not so old, I'd trade some noise and a pleasant view for convenience and an awesome nightlife.
We were recently picking up someone from a hotel and had some confusion about which of several doors we were supposed to go to. My daughter asked, "WHY are there SO MANY DOORS?" Well my dear daughter, there's this lovely TH-cam channel called Fascinating Horror.....
i lived in a couple of blocks that were both built in 67-68 same as this place, one of them used to sway so much in a high wind that it made you unsteady on your feet, in another the entire window casement , like 12 feet by 4 weighing, well a lot just fell out of the flat above me one night narrowly avoiding two dudes on the ground
The tallest building I worked in was in Milwaukee. Forty floors. There was definitely a very, very slight sway in windy weather (Milwaukee is much more windy than Chicago), but after the first day, I never noticed it again.
@@pioneercynthia1 yeah this one was only 14 stories and i was on the 8th it was bizarrely unstable theres a lot of old mine workings around here and i think the ground under it may be a bit insubstantial
Story time: In 1995, an 11 stories tall block of flats built with the LPS method in the 70's in Gdańsk, Poland, had the entire bottom floor blown out from underneath it, due to a gas leak accumulating inside overnight. The entire block was lifted slightly and then fell down on the rubble *_in one piece_* . It stood 9 stories tall after the fact.
the design really is an odd case of being bad, but at the same time strangely resilient. i'm amazed that when the corner of this building collapsed it didn't bring down more of the building.
@@syx3sIt depends on the angle or pressure wave of the explosion. If the pressure wave was expanded equally around the ground floor, it's possible the whole construction would simply fall onto said floor. On this video, the explosive force acted on one side -un equally placing pressure on one side,. .. Have a look at shaped charges...
@@stuartd9741 natural gas explosions exert pressure more or less evenly in all directions until / unless they are funneled in a specific direction and gain momentum.
"Should we do this properly?" "Nah, let's just fill it with our cr*p" From what I remember, there were cigarette cartons and beer cans found in the jounts when it was dismantled.
You missed a key point brought up in the video: this construction method required a minimal of skilled labor. Meaning, that the vast majority of the workers weren't qualified to work on high-rise construction (and may have had minimal to no construction experience). They weren't being lazy. They literally had no idea what they were doing, which is on the people that hired them (and neglected to train them properly), not the workers themselves.
@@asnaghall It's not just training either. Building work needs to be supervised adequately so that the incompetent or lazy cannot cut corners. I know of a local authority housing project in the North of England which appeared to have been properly supervised, but soon after completion major cracks started to appear. It was then discovered that every time supervisors weren't present, the bricklayers were laying the bricks upside down. Why? -because if you don't have to fill the "frog" (the hollow on top of the brick) with mortar, you can lay the bricks faster and earn more bonus. In that case the local authority did sue the builders, whose excuse was that they no longer employed the bricklayers and didn't have any records as to who they were!
@@davidjones332 doesn't surprise me one bit. they've allowed cheap labour to flood the UK for years. They come in, undercut the oldschool experienced British brickie who takes pride in his work. send the money out of the country, do the job as lazily and cheaply as they can, and bugger off home where they've bought a nice big plot of land, built a house (the right way up) and live the kind of life a British worker never gets to. The same with many trades being undercut by low quality cheap work. I don't blame the people though. they have families and lives and aren't bad people, they just want something nice for themselves like the rest of us, even if sometimes they can be a little lazy. Heck I'd go work in another country if they offered me 10x the wage for the same job I do at home There are cracks in this country that run much deeper than a few upside down bricks and I think people are starting to see them
Vertical slums for the poor. They knew they were bad when they were built, and people did not want to live in them, they all wanted to remain in the areas being cleared away in the name of modernity.
Sometimes us poor got no choice to live in these slums. Blame the landlord or whoever is in charge of matnence and repair. (In this case, defently blame the cost cutters who built this thing. Ciggerette packages and newspapers, really?)
@@zombiedoggie2732 Image living in an old cattle barn that had been crudely turn into bedroom suits. But the good thing, I guess, is that as bad is for the first world poor it compares nothing to the third world. :(
There’s plenty of evidence that people being very excited about moving into these flats with central heating and indoor toilets, both things that were not present in many of the slums that were being cleared to make way for these tower blocks.
I lived there for a while after the rebuild. Empty flats were offered to the London Chest Hospital as staff accommodation. The hospital ended up with a whole floor. It was great.
The hospital where i live was built only to last 25 years. Its nearly 40 years now. Not much improvements and the celings are falling in. There is uproar about it.
Building a *hospital*, a major infrastructure project that often takes more than a year to even complete in the first place, that only lasts 25 years is absolutely ludicrous.
Yes, many of those built with RAAC (Reinforced Aerated Aluminium Concrete) flat roofs were only designed to last 20 to 25 years. A good example is the QE II Hospital in King's Lynn, Norfolk, where hundreds of Acrow props are being used to hold up the ceiling, which is in danger of collapsing. This building was constructed in 1980, so it's already way past its sell by date. It might have cost more to construct with a gabled, tiled roof, but in the long run, it would have been far cheaper.
It must make you feel dizzy if you live on the top floor of a tower block and take a look out the window to see the massive drop below i certainly wouldn't feel comfortable living in an apartment that high off the ground it makes it all the more difficult to escape if a fire develops in the buiding than if you live on the floors that are closer to the ground
In my opinion it was the shockingly shoddy work of the construction that caused Ronan Point; The Grenfell Tower tragedy was the cutting corners and under the table deals.
In the 60 all over Europe bad building engineering was common. My apprentice school in Zurich-Switzerland had ceiling heater system, we had hot heads and cold feed.
@@DolleHengst yeah, i don`t know, an engineer on drugs maybe. It was really dramatic because to gain a comfortable temperature on your body, they had to blow higher temperatures to reach the floor. A total mess, we had red ears and a boiling brain.
This is very similar to the Champlain South Tower condo collapse in Surfside, FL, in 2021. The moral of that story is if the owners won't fix it despite all you try, save yourself and move out.
Tower blocks were appalling. Quickly became the focus of crime. Hellish to live in. I know of one that became sheltered housing, and that can work but ONLY with a conceige and good security.
I lived in one with my parents in North Manchester, 1964 to 1981, a 12 Storey block. Then my dad became seriously ill after a stroke and we got moved to a 2 storey building, we were in the ground floor, in a 2 bed flat. 20 years later, Manchester Council sold the blocks of flats to a private developer, which erected security fencing around the area of the remaining blocks and an electronically controlled security gate, as just prior to this vandalism and arson had resulted in many of the flats lying empty. This seems to have worked, many of the flats have been sold or rented privately, also the security measures have greatly reduced instances of crime and vandalism in the area.
There was a notorious estate near me like that. One of the roughest parts of the city and was basically a local meme, there was a block of flats where we joked about being "sent to" if we failed at life. It was demolished in mid-late 2011 and modern low-rise housing now stands on the site.
In the late 1970s my sister applied for, and got, a flat in the Elephant and Castle area. This was under a scheme called Homesteaders or something similar. I was terrified for them, especially when they had their first child. It was on the thirteenth floor and I so worried about them. They got. a house a couple of years later, and moved to their own house where they still live. My daughter lives on the third floor of a really modern block, and there are signs everywhere about if there is a fire or other emergency to stay put. I make her promise every time I see her that if there are any problems to leave immediately. I find it strange that rich people will spend millions of pounds on penthouses! Me, I live on the ground floor, never lived higher than the first floor. Even at work when I was on the sixth floor I was intensely nervous. Seriously, keep your luxurious penthouses with views etc! I like. being. In. a bedroom where I can help out of the window.
17.04.1995 in Gdańsk, Poland, gas explosion happened in 11 floor block of flats, which resulted with collapse of underground cellars, ground floor and first floor. But despite it has similiar construction as Ronan Point, upper floors stayed almost intact, just a bit tilted. 22 residents died, and 12 were injured. it was still a great lucky, because in that house in this time were about 140 people. Buildings of this construction can be durable if they are built correctly. Interestingly, because this referes to building from 1972, from the times of socialism in Poland.
That ambulance SMK 617F was literally just two weeks old when this disaster occurred. Registered on 2nd May 1968. Random detail I know. Many of these tower blocks also aged horribly and were starting to be pulled down by the turn of the Millennium - that is no more than 35 years. There was an estate somewhere up north that was so racked with crime and antisocial behaviour that it survived something like 12 years. In both cases, what a total waste.
I went to that incident as I was based at Plaistow Fire Station and Ronan Point was on my fireground. I did not go to the initial incident, but later in the morning to relieve crews that were already there. I recall seeing the speed at which Ronan Point was built, about 1.5 floors per week.
My parents and older brother were living in the block next to Ronan Point. They got rehoused in a nice new wimpy home in East Ham, built on an old bombsite plot of land. Crazy to think there were still lots of theses plots around well into the 1970s. The council even helped them get a mortgage. My dad was self employed so it was pretty hard to get a mortgage back then. Newham council were desperate to keep young families in borough, because there had been a big Exodus of young families to new towns like Harlow, Milton Keynes or Basildon. There's a myth that immigrants pushed the locals out, but the truth is, the boomers were leaving London in droves long before that. My parents moved into the new house in 73 and I was born in my parents bedroom a few years later. Me and my brothers had a lovely childhood in that house and we wouldn't have ended up there if it wasn't for the Ronan Point explosion.
The rebuilding of Ronan Point after the explosion led to improvements that were implemented in buildings then being constructed. Including Grenfell Tower, such that if part of the building collapsed, it would not bring the whole thing down. I knew about Ronan Point thanks to some avid Wiki-walking in the months after the Grenfell fire, but again, thank you for covering a much lesser-known disaster in your usual sensitive and thoughtful way. You have never sought to sensationalise anything you've covered and you always bring out the improvements and good things that were implemented in the wake of each disaster you've covered. Thank you, again.
Lol! American here. Saw the year..saw the date..and immediately linked the sketch to this incident. “Oohhh…THAT’S what inspired it!” Still one of the best sketches ever.
My aunt and uncle moved into a 5 level council block in Wembley, they had a delivery road that ran over the flats below, so their bins could be emptied and the milk delivered, needless to say the large vehicles running over the top of their flat used to wake them up every morning. The vibrations caused cracks , the kids ran riot in the roads , overturning bins etc, and the entire block was a mess after a year, they moved to another, smaller flat, which was about 4 storeys high, but at least was a better construction level and seemed like it would stay upright for a lot longer.
Wow imagine being blown out of ur bedroom high up in a tower block and only waking on the ground with a few bruises. I guess the guy must’ve been a bit shocked and surprised!
I remember as a kid watching the construction of a tower block, it was lego like. A crane dropped housing units on top of each other building upwards. Quite fascinating and very fast.
Tower blocks are and have always been aesthetically hideous and unsafe. They're an enduring symbol of classism and an erosion of dignity, privacy and freedom for people who can't afford their own property.
Oh please, should I indenture myself to build a palace for the inept and lazy? When someone else is footing the bill you get what you get and you say thank you
@@evil1by1 And that's why socialism and communism will never work beyond mere theory. I should point out to you though that nobody "gets what they get and say thank you", these ugly tower blocks just become slums, crime hubs and brothels and when they eventually fail due to gentrification or lack of proper maintenance, these "inept and lazy" people end up occupying your neighbourhood and invading your space whether you want them there or not. Usually it's in the form of tent encampments or dark alleyways. If they're mentally ill or disabled, it's beyond their own control. If they're undocumented migrants or drug/alcohol users, they may pose a safety risk to your community. Tower blocks are aesthetic eyesores and nobody living in them has any pride in upholding them because, well, why would they? The government stuck them in an ugly and unsafe living space. Ugliness begets ugliness. Greed and apathy also beget greed and apathy. An overall lack of consideration for vulnerable populations leads to a society where everybody only takes care of themselves, you can't trust your own neighbours and nobody feels safe.
The working classes need houses? Right, let's throw up some Brutalist slabs and rake in those government subsidies while still cutting corners on "safety" features - safety for the poor?! Haha.
The guy on the mattress was *insanely* lucky. Goddamn. I bet he only rented bottom floor apartments from that point on in his life.... Also, only four deaths is damn near miraculous, especially considering the Storm of '87 was just the following year. And if you want poorly built apartments, the last dorm I had in college was the oldest building on campus. One night I was waiting to get a shower, and it sounded like my dorm-mate was taking *forever* so I walked in only to see that there was a literal waterfall coming *out of the wall.* I informed my RA and we went up, floor by floor, following the soaking wet walls all the way up to the top floor. The very top floor's bath was leaking, causing a cascade of leaks in everyone else's bathrooms (every floor had the exact same plan.) It did not instill much confidence in the overall structure of the building. Thankfully, it was demolished the year after I graduated and a new one was built.
Thank you for researching this problem. I didn't ever live in London but I did live in Portsdown park in Cosham Portsmouth for some time. That place was a death trap and it was finally demolish a few years after i had moved out. I lived in a flat with a sheer drop from my front door of 6 floors. the Park consisted of maisonette's three on top of each other and then a box flat on top of that which was where i had moved into, for someone who was deathly afraid of heights, it was very scary, i was even scared to go out on my balcony because it was another sheer drop from there also to the ground below next to the maisonette's were three tower blocks that were adjoined by the maisonette's most of the time the elevator did work or was under repair and when you are newly pregnant having to walk up 8 flights of stairs, was more than hard work. The person who designed the park was also the same designer of the Tricorn parking structure in Commercial Road, Portsmouth, which has always been an ugly white elephant but it is still in use today, which is very scary as it has been there since the 1960 or 70's, it has always been an absolute eye sore, to say the least. In the park were also single homes and row houses which were much safer in my opinion. Portsdown park was torn down from the tower blocks top floor to the ground as they worked, it would have been far quicker to use dynamite in my opinion. The council is notoriously known for cutting corners and being tight with funds for the tenants that have no choice but to live in these death traps, Queen Alexandra hospital was right across the street literally. the counsel needs to be taken to task over their management practices, they are not very good at fixing the problems that arise in their buildings they own and they give the tenants a really hard time when they do need something fixing. But they are quite happy to kick you out of their buildings if you miss a payment or too or social services were not paying your rent when they were supposed to be. Then the Grenville tower fire was just horrific, all to save money and using materials that were not fire safe was just criminal. I hope they pulled that building down and put a memorial in its place. the amount of people that were killed in that fire. it was criminal. I don't know how the council keeps getting away with that stuff. Its not the first fire they have had in their buildings. Whom ever was the Architect's and Engineer's working for the council and over seeing the build, need to have criminal charges laid against them, it was criminal to cut corners on safety. Its a shame more people cannot afford to buy their own places. I know if i could have afforded to buy my own place i would have done so. I live far far away from any council now and i wont loose sleep over that move. Cutting corners and over charging in rent makes life more difficult for people to pick and choose where they live, When the council offers you a place you are advised to take what they give you or your right back to the bottom of a waiting list. i am sure that still hasn't changed and i left the UK in 1990. Am i shocked by this research not in the slightest its typical council no mater where you live in the UK you will get an unsafe building or its damp and moldy cracks in the ceilings and walls windows are drafty back gates don't close properly and no escape if your walkway outside your door collapses substandard housing is a common thing because they can keep getting away with stuff like this now all that money wasted on building that crap could have gone to build better homes to give families help in getting them into their own houses not to gouge people of their hard earned money so they cannot save up to buy their own homes. I am glad i left when i did. There is a really nice housing estate there the last time i was in the UK that was in 2019. I have no faith in the councils in the UK they will never do things the right way and the safe way they will always cut costs go for the lowest bids and cut corners every chance they get. this is the way the council operates and this is also why they need to be under new management with structure and safety without cutting corners and grace periods when financial help is not cooperating with the tenants. They will never change until they are charged and people go to prison for their incompetence and neglect of peoples safety. and stop gouging the tenants for their substandard accommodation. Great video can't wait for the next one. Great job!
Hey! I just wanted to say thank you for all the videos and the time you put into them. They are very informative and educational and i enjoy passing my spare time watching these. Ive learned quite a bit.
I used to live in Kidderminster and 2 tower blocks on Hoo Rd used same construction. They were evacuated after this incident but not demolished instead they were empty for a number of years, but then they where refurbished and removed some of the upper floors, they are still in use today
I dunno why, but I've grown to love this format of story telling. You're probably my favorite crow (or raven, sorry can't tell from pic) on TH-cam. My favorite part is always how you conclude your videos. Love the takeaways and the music, really stays true to the tone. This is good stuff. Keep it up.
The mystery series “Endeavour” based an episode on this. Did gas in the UK not have mercaptan added? It was added in the US after the New London School explosion in 1937. You’d have noticed the smell in an enclosed space.
Yes, in those days they would have been using town's gas, a 50:50 mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, both of which are combustible, explosive gases but have no odour. Mercaptan would have been added at a few parts per million to enable any leaks to be detected by a sense of smell.
This is the exact same construction I witnessed as young boy in the mid to late 1960's in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham. They knocked down perfectly good Victorian houses, homing well-established hard-working families. The tower blocks were then populated by people from heaven-knows-where, who brought nothing but trouble. It's also when I learnt the word suicide, as the towers provided an unequivocal method when jumped off. By 1969 Tottenham had descended into a ghetto, so we moved out to a leafy suburb in Hertfordshire. These places may have looked utopian vision of the future as architect models and drawings in planning meetings, but they delivered a social sub-culture disaster that still exists today.
Excellent film, really well explained. From Ronan Point to Grenfell, you can see why many Brits don't want to live in tower blocks. Unlike in alot of other countries where tower bkocks have a decent reputation, and high rise living is sought after; that's not the case in the UK, where tower blocks have generally never had a good reputation, and most people certainly do not 'aspire' to live in one. Where possible we prefer a house.... and even better if it has a garden aswell. Brits like their houses and gardens, and do not wish to swap them for high rise living. Unfortunately, they have become a 'depository' for the urban poor. Whether this was intentional is up for debate, but that's how they're seen here in the UK. Luxury high rise living is for those in other countries - not for us Brits. Of course there are luxury tower bkocks here too, but they remain largely unpopular, and many flats in them are never occupied..... remaining empty or just a property 'asset' for someone who living in Qatar or the Far East.
My parents' depression era house had newspaper as insulation, which we discovered when doing a renovation. They filled joints in a HI-RISE with it? Hmmm... I wonder why it fell down...AND THEY DIDN'T LEARN! Not stupid. Criminal. 'Hey, granny, I know it's hard for you to get out but could you come to OUR house for Christmas? I don't want my kids in your hi-rise...'
The workers were. Let's just say, 'not good'. When the block was dismantled, cigarette cartons, newspapers and beer cans were found in the joints. The workers were boozed up and couldn't be bothered to do their jobs to any degree. Unfortunately they got away with it. If the block had been built properly, it would have been very different.
Newspaper is a remarkably good insulator against the cold. Think of old movies where you might see hoboes or drunks sleeping rough using newspapers as blankets. My late father, a policeman, worked an assignment as a decoy where he had to pretend to sleep on a bench and he used a newspaper to cover himself. He said it kept him quite warm. But, you don't use the newspaper in place of mortar, or concrete, or better insulating materials which are also fireproof. And you certainly don't use it as a filler when the different parts of a building should not have gaps between them!
Web is really the person we long to have in every city --someone who loos at these frightening building issues and raises the alarmabout widespead danger to prevent who-knows-how-many deaths from similar issues. There was a lot of injury here and some death, and I don't want to minimize any lifelong disability that came out of this, but the human cost could have been wildly greater. Nice to see that he saw that and devoted time and energy to fixing as many similar disasters as he could before they happened. It's not often we have the record of these individual lagacies of people using their expertise to save lives, even though such work is usually hard going and they could do something easier at any moment. Such people should have monuments.
There's lots of other good documentary channels. Try Plainly Difficult and Mentour Pilot. For something different try Coral City Camera, it is in Miami so there's only anything to see daytime Miami but it also has a really friendly chatroom. Also try Live From Iceland multiview, it is looking at the area of recent eruptions in Iceland and another is due any day, the chatroom will pop up when an eruption is imminent. Going off TH-cam, Zooniverse has a wonderful selection of projects using crowdsourcing to study wildlife.
I work in the mechanical field and often handle gas appliances. It is so easy to mishandle gas fittings and it is extremely important to take the extra care when working with gas equipment. I can recall a time where my co-worker neglected to properly test for gas leakage, and when showing up the next day to complete the job, I was immediately hit with a VERY strong smell of natural gas that the home owners had no idea existed. As it turns out, people don't notice subtle gas fume accumulation. Please take care, if you interact with such equipment.
Fun fact: This system of large scale panel housing was also very common in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, since those countries were suffering from huge housing shortages after WWII, and the communist governments needed a way to provide housing as quick and cheap as possible. If you travel to any city within Central or Eastern Europe, or within the ex-USSR countries, you'll find these kinds of apartment buildings everywhere. This has unfortunately garned the system's reputation of being a "communist" style of construction, with many people saying that the buildings look ugly and repetetive, and citing it as a reason that we should go back to building classical style buildings (I.E buildings that Europe used to build in the 19th and 20th centuries), at least according to some city planning TH-camrs I've seen. Personally, I don't mind this kind of architecture, so long as it's maintained well and not left to rot for all eternity (which is why a lot of these buildings nowadays look rough and abandoned). In fact, countries like Germany and Poland are going through major gentrification projects on their panel apartments, such as giving them a new coat of paint and removing those weird covered balconies that didn't really serve any purpose other than a storage closet.
In former Czechoslovakia thousands of those buuildings were built in 70s and 80s, but they were actually designed with Ronan point disaster in mind. They are disigned so thet outside wall panels aren't part of the structural system. In case of a large explosion they are supposed to be blown away, but the structure should remain standing. For example, this happened Slovakia in 2019 - a massive gas explosion, way stronger than Ronan point one, but the building didn't collapse. P.S. However, I don't think this applies to all countries of former Eastern Block!!!
In terms of aesthetics, bare concrete and sheetrock look OK when new, and don't hold up too bad in a dry climate, but quickly become stained and horrible after a few years of damp weather. Their insulating properties also aren't great.
Yes - neither LPS construction nor high rise tower blocks doesn't have to be either ugly or unsafe. Done properly they can give people good housing in which they can lead good lives. Doing these things properly only takes a little more money, but when your country is poor and needs lots of housing in a hurry the temptation to skimp becomes very strong.
I feel like it is bizarrely appropriate that the outcome of rampant corner-cutting was an actual corner of the building falling off. I mean, a screenwriter who pitched that idea would get thrown out of the producer's office.
Also, I just realized that this was basically the literal embodiment of the second bid in the Monty Python architect sketch. "Well, as long as the tenants are of light build and relatively sedentary, I think we're onto a winner here!"
Now you have me wondering if Monty Python fashioned that skit after this disaster????????????????????? Not sure when that skit aired. Love Monty Python by the way. John Cleese is by far one of my favorite actors! Department Of Silly Walks has to be one of my favorites of all time!! LOL!!
@@MelodyMLucianoNorris-qe8lc Well, I got curious and looked around a bit, and according to Wikipedia, the sketch was recorded in September 1970. With that, it seems extremely likely to me that it _was_ a direct reference.
All that script would need is a woman in it, then to make her gay and lame@@MelodyMLucianoNorris-qe8lc
Really? Ever seen Towering Inferno? The fire in that film was caused by dodgy wiring. It would be interesting to know if such a fire was actually caused by this in real life. Many multi storey blocks of flats had gas supplies removed after the incident at Ronan Point. However, I lived in a 12 storey block of flats in North Manchester, from 1964 to 1981, and we had a gas supply to our cooker. I even remember in the early 1970s, all the burners on our cooker had to be replaced by ones suitable for North Sea Gas (methane), which had a flame speed different to town's gas (a 50:50 mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen).
@@paultaylor7082 I really hope you meant carbon dioxide.
The stove who's gas caused the collapse survived without damage? Maybe these stove manufacturers should try their hand at building construction. They seem to have the sturdiness on lock already.
New world made so cracking great cookers. My mum had one for 75 years.
That thing must be built like a brick shit house it blew up fell multiple floors then still worked! They don’t make em like that anymore !
Today's "designed to fail" appliances have about a 5 year life. What junk.
@@limeyosu2000 😁😇
"The stove whose gas...."
The man flying out of the building on his mattress, still asleep, sounds like a classic scene straight out of Looney Toons
@whitneyloreu Mr Bean!😂😂😂😂
Or Homer Simpson.
@@duncancurtis5108 thats not looney toons
Maybe a Three Stooges film.
It's even more Looney Toons like that it's a situation that person would normally die or get seriously injured, but he only took minor injury somehow.
9:58 Experts have said that Ronan Point wouldn't have survived the Great Storm of 1987 (one year after the demolition of the building)
Experts wanted Roman Point to be demolished for a long time. When it was finally dismantled in 1986, it was discovered thai it was in way worse condition then they predicted (massive cracks in lower floors).
Could have saved some tax monies there
@@keefkhat4337 Let nature do the work!
@@jantrnka1462😮
Imagine if Michael Fish had lived there.
The fact that the council didn't carry out remedial works is of no surprise to us. We live in the UK and used to live in a 19-storey Tower Block in the Midlands. It had 114 flats. I was in a 1-bed flat and one day when my window was open, it was caught by the wind and slammed shut, cracking the window from top to bottom. I reported it, and reported it, then finally a worker turned up and said, 'Oh, wrong window.' He had been told that it was the reinforced glass on my balcony that was broken. Later that day, I finally had it replaced.
However, my husband had one better than this. He lived in a 2-bed flat in the same block, just on a higher floor, and when he moved in there was a large crack in the glass panel that surrounded the balcony. He was on the 11th floor, which was literally 100ft (he measured it whilst drunk one evening using a ball of string with a nut tied on the end, then used a tape measure) He reported the crack. Nothing happened. He reported it a further 8 times.
Finally, he woke up one morning after a windy night and found the very large piece of reinforced glass that spanned approximately 50% of the balcony, lying inside the balcony. He went to the council offices again, and this time he reported that half of the glass was now in the balcony. If the rest fell out and happened to fall down, it would kill someone as it would come down like a guillotine. He also stated that if it was not fixed by the end of the day, he would be ringing the local newspaper to tell them all about it. Strangely, the council suddenly became VERY efficient and the glass was replaced the same day. The workman who came round was laughing at the level of panic he had created at the council offices.
We ended up living together in his flat and we had various issues. The lighting was out on the floor around the lift and stairwell. There was debris, faecal matter and used needles in the stairwell and a mega build up of pigeon muck at the ground floor exit door. We had reported these things to no avail. There was even a concierge office, and they had been reporting these issues also to no avail. So we contacted the local Wolverhampton Express & Star and a reporter came round.
The Tower Block was called Wodensfield Tower, however, we called it Toilet Towers and this title appealed to the reporter who took photos and spoke to us. Our story ended up on the third page with a picture of us in the stairwell alongside the rubbish and graffiti, and the headline was Toilet Towers. The article was a fair size. Miraculously, the council came round in very short order afterwards, replaced the lighting, cleaned the stairwells and removed the pigeon muck..... Amazing what a little bit of bad publicity can do isn't it?
That was a great share and my best wishes to both of you :-)
Reminds me of the song "Mile End" from the Trainspotting soundtrack.
We live in a council house in the south east and it's just as bad here. We've had non stop problems since we moved in, from simple things like cracked windows to the fact our front door sometimes just doesn't open, like you push the handle down and it won't budge. It's a serious fire risk and yet, 2 years on, we're STILL trying to get someone to come out and fix it.
You're good people
i wish bad publicity worked to pressure negligent building owners/managers today, but it doesn't seem to do so. your story does give me a little hope, and i hope the both of you are doing well!
Imagine being such a heavy sleeper that you dont even wake up from falling down multiple floors
I laughed at that part of the video because I am such a sleeper. I once slept through a tornado. I was also blissfully unaware of a runaway dump truck that rolled down a hill by my house before demolishing a rock wall in my front yard. Not even the police responding to the truck incident were enough to wake me up. So yeah, that is totally something that would happen to me.
Being that type of sleeper probably saved him
Waking up to fresh air and birds chirping while trying to recall whether you have been drinking heavily the night before.
😅😅😅🛌🐑🐑🐑
When my dad was a kid, he fell off of a bunk bed & broke his nose. He slept through the whole thing. He didn't even know it had happened until the next morning.
Stove: I'm alright
Building: I'm done.
😉 Well said.
Yep. Maybe the manufacturer of the stove should have branched out into building construction!
@@suekelley2109 🙏🏻🤣
😅
The makers of the stove is a for profit company who NEEDS to have a good reputation to stay in business. The building's owner was the government. They don't NEED to have a good reputation they have no competition!
I mean I think it’s alarming that the expected lifespan of the building was only 60 years. That’s not a long time. It didn’t even make it 20 years.
Right? Our house is 52 years old and I think of it as being relatively new.
It didn't even make it 2 months, honestly.
60 years for a building like this was deemed okay. It was intended to be replaced long before then.
Yeah! I was thinking that my own 6-storey building is about that old and is in good shape.
Practicality isn't the concern when they build these but rather money. It's cheaper to rebuild every fifty years than it is to make things properly. It's also about passing costs onto future generations instead of investing in the future, a problem that is particularly important nowadays.
Always like it when Fascinating Horror and Plainly Difficult cover the same incidences. Each one covers points which the other didn't.
Same
Find these an easier listen. I find Plainly Difficult’s speech pattern hard to listen to. He’s a native English speaker, as am I, but puts in strange pauses and commas that don’t belong where he puts them. Maybe I am just being petty.
@@sparky4878I can’t listen to Plainly even though I’m subbed to him. Fascinating Horror is more coherent. I have that he’d Plainly in quite some time
They should have switched places for April fools
@@sparky4878 Yes, I stopped watching him for the same reason. It seems to have gotten worse over the last several months, I think he's taking less care to redo recordings and edit them properly. There was one particular video where he misspoke and corrected himself while quoting someone involved in the accident so that it sounded like *they* were the one who misspoke and that that error was a contributor to what happened. It took me a while to figure out that he simply hadn't bothered to re-record to fix it.
Who was held accountable and paid for the corrupt building? Let me guess, no one.
If anything, probably the construction workers became scapegoats
This is exactly what I was coming to the comments to ask.
As explaine in the video it was a government-made construction.
@@clray123 government officials built it?
Taylor-Woodrow, the building contractor, could (and probably should) have had a least a measure of liability based on the spectactularly poor workmanship. This isn't "scapegoating" - it's not far off corporate manslaughter. The local authority, however, might also bear some responbility based the fact that it was the responsible client for the work. This was not a "government-made" construction - it was a local authority managed job. These days I suspect (or at least hope) the outcome would have been different.
It is important to point out that a huge proportion of large scale building projects are built in this way - effectively by kit. The specific engineering issue in these early-ish examples was that the load bearing element was the external wall rather than a steel frame.
Lived in the sister block Gannon Point from 1971 to 1985, someone sneezed on the 1st floor, someone on the 22nd floor said bless you! In high winds you could feel the building sway!
Those high rise flats are supposed to sway in high winds, I remember staying in a Victorian holiday let on the Kent coast in the 1990s [3 floors] during a storm the light fitting were swaying and the building was moving
Swaying is a good thing, even though it feels weird. I knew a guy who was in the Transamerica skyscraper in San Francisco during an earthquake. It stayed up because of the properties that let it sway. That said, no thank you.
The building looks like it was built slightly crooked, pre blast
That sounds terrifying
Tall buildings NEED to sway, otherwise they break.
I remember as a child being driven past this block in the weeks after it happened, I was 9 but still remember feelings of horror when seeing the collapsed floors. I find the fact that the lifespan of these buildings was only intended to be 60 years anyway appalling. Why all that effort and expense for such a short time when houses can be built to last centuries. I would rather live in a tent than a tower block, no matter how well built it was!
In former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, millions of people live in buildings like these, to make this even worse all of former Yugoslavia and parts of former Soviet Union are an earthquake zone. There was a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Zagreb, Croatia in 2020 and these types of buildings were severely damaged, but were repaired and put back in use. I wonder how long will they last...
Modern buildings are not designed to last too long now. It is not cost effective. A building that can last for centuries is expensive to build and will most likely be demolished long before it is worn out.
These buildings were intended to have been replaced long before they were life expired.
^ Nah. That's just a strawman argument used by cheapskates in the Industry; people like them were to blame for Ronan Point.
Welcome to construction. Most buildings you walk in are designed to only last 30 yrs
@@ptonpc "These buildings were intended to have been replaced long before they were life expired."
Indeed. And that's a major problem with our current use-and-throw-away mentality. Yes, building a house that will last is more expensive, but in the long run it's cheaper than building, demolishing, building, demolishing, etc... We ought to be planing for the long term sustainability of our society, not for a quick buck here and now.
"...offered tea and brandy." If I was a survivor, I would be passing on the tea and ask that the brandy remain flowing!
Gotta have the tea to stay up. And antioxidants.
That is the most British comfort I can think of.
I thought it awesome that brandy was part of the offerings. LOL! I would have gladly partaken of both!
@@joshuabessire9169 that's why we get tricked by the regime all the time, because everyone is drunk all the time. Too drunk to care that a nursery just got attacked
I was just thinking what it would be like to have your apt destroyed then be offered brandy early in the morning. Goodness id get drunk😅
Doesn't surprise me, Newham Council are terrible even to this day. I was under them when I was a student, they were so bad. Not only were all the houses we were shown to stay in falling apart because they hadn't bothered to maintain them, but they also tried to put me and my student friends in prison because we hadn't paid council tax that we were exempt from. This was because they'd only bothered to pick up half of the student register at the Uni. They never apologised and the threatening letters kept coming for a month after they'd acknowledged and accepted that we were students and thus, tax exempt.
Newham is still a complete hole. Probably the most deprived Borough in London even now and has escaped basically all forms of serious gentrification.
Ronan Point is (was) in what's now Canning Town and that is not anywhere you want to end up.
Sleepy dude's mattress company should have used that as an advert.
Im calling bullshit on that. Even if he somehow landed flat, which judging by the way it collapsed is incredibly unlikely. Then given that the only bedrooms to collapse where at the very top alone makes it impossible to believe. But lets pretend somehow maybe he had a bed in the living room and it hit the wind just right and he landed flat, he would immediately be crushed by falling debris.
@@bradsanders407 not everything is BS, strange things happen that you can't explain. I hope one day they happen to you where you try to explain to people and they doubt you.
He was lucky that guy in. Tte bed glad he survived, i bet there's been tonnes of jokes about it my mate said the bed he was in was made by flying giny company 😅,
Hope he didn't stash his bingo money there😂
@@lukesayers5850 lol
The Danish firm that invented LPS, Over Arup, never intended it to be used for buildings over 4 storeys because that was the legal limit in Denmark at the time.
Another cause of the collapse was thr use of sea-dredged aggregates I'm making the concrete: the salt in thr concrete corroded the rears in the concrete and weakened them to the point of uselessness.
My grandfather was one of the dockers who stopped work and went to the site to offer help as rescue workers. The press reported their action as "Another dock strike"!
During the building of this and other tower blocks in Newham, the most familiar sight on the boroughs roads were the lorries belonging to the Hoveringhsm company, a business that specialised in the sale of "sea-dredged aggregstes"(sand and ballast dredged from the sea) to the construction industry. The high salt content of these materials proved deadly to the iron rears in the reinforced concrete , and contributed to the collapse of Ronan Point, necessitating the eventual evacuation of this and many other blocks.
Did I read this right? The idea that salt-laden material (from the sea!) mixed with steel makes it rust much faster just never crossed their minds?? Did they share a single brain cell between them?
I suspect that the fact that the contractors, suppliers and councillors were all members of the Funny Handshake Club had something to do with it.
Damn media always making something out of nothing
@@trevormillar1576remember: when it happens in other countries it is deemed 'corruption' but here in the UK it is mere 'cronyism'.
You either want to save lives or save money, but it seems greed never allows both.
The whole purpose of constructing these ugly buildings is to pack away and contain large amounts of a given nation's poor, disabled and immigrants while ignoring the issues that contribute to these people existing in the first place... very sad situation. In America they used to spray toxic chemicals on these tower blocks to test on the predominant racial minorities living there. In Canada, tower blocks are largely inhabited by transients who struggle to hold down a job and are often addicts or mentally ill. A lot of "newcomers" are dumped there, sometimes multiple families crammed into one apartment unit. These buildings almost always have issues with rats, mold, insects, privacy violations, weather damage and drugs... a good study on why tower blocks don't work to save lives is the Cabrini-Green Housing Project in Chicago... tall high-rises in urban areas have become symbolic of modern segregation, government corruption, failed socialism and the inherent dignity that comes with owning one's own private property, something that is blatantly lacking in the class divide created by tower block living.
@@RebeccaMayeHolidayNobody cares about the poor. But they keep reproducing adding more cheap labor and consumers for the corporation.
That's capitalism
@@cubey Actually you see shoddy tower blocks as more of a socialized form of housing to stuff undesired demographics cheaply into one space...
@@cubey So are active shooters! Only in the hedonistic and meaningless Western world!🤣
oookay... when i read the title i thought something WAY different lol.
You and me both 😜
same brotha hehe
Serial killer hides favorite newspapers in his victim's joints, or people died from smoking joints full of newspapers instead of weed?
i was thinking that the newspapers had random victims joints in them
I thought we going to anatomy next 😂
I still don't know how you (repeatedly) mange to address such horrific events with such dignity and respect. My hat is off to you, sir.
Thank you for all your investigative work on this, and just reporting it without the hype and drama so often seen with other sites. We really appreciate your hard work. 🇦🇺👍
I also appreciate that he pointed out how many are STILL DEFICIENT.
@@craigpridemore7566Also Surfside Towers in Miami USA.
I was expecting a much higher injury and death toll. It could have been so much higher!
@@andreagriffiths3512 I think its cuz everyone was asleep and it was mostly the living rooms that collapsed so they werent in their living rooms
He doesn't mention that the building was 90% empty as new residents had yet to move in.
As I traveled home to central London from Dagenham late on that fateful day, I saw this damage. I was so astonished that I parked my car and stood with others in disbelief and shock.
Thank you for telling the story behind what could have been a major tragedy.
Tho given the recent fire deaths in a London tower block - “When will they ever learn?”
Thanks for posting this video THE DAY AFTER I MOVED INTO A HIGH-RISE!!!
All levity aside, another disaster explained, without fanfare or sensationalism. This is why we love your channel.
Ewww city life
@@samholdsworth420 I'm rarely home, and the noise is kinda reassuring. Lived in the country a few years ago, found the silence unsettling. At least shouting, traffic, gunshots and sirens are reminders that there are other people close by.
@@andygarside2418So you’d rather listen to shouting, traffic and gunshots than birds/rain/wind?
The best part of living in the country is not having to deal with millions of other people. FUCK living in a tower block.
@@yungamuraiwe're all different, buddy! The country smells like horse shit, the people tend to be nosey wankers and the shops are a 20 minute drive away. I'm not so old, I'd trade some noise and a pleasant view for convenience and an awesome nightlife.
@@yungamuraismall towns are always in everyone’s business I can’t stand it
We were recently picking up someone from a hotel and had some confusion about which of several doors we were supposed to go to. My daughter asked, "WHY are there SO MANY DOORS?"
Well my dear daughter, there's this lovely TH-cam channel called Fascinating Horror.....
i lived in a couple of blocks that were both built in 67-68 same as this place, one of them used to sway so much in a high wind that it made you unsteady on your feet, in another the entire window casement , like 12 feet by 4 weighing, well a lot just fell out of the flat above me one night narrowly avoiding two dudes on the ground
The tallest building I worked in was in Milwaukee. Forty floors. There was definitely a very, very slight sway in windy weather (Milwaukee is much more windy than Chicago), but after the first day, I never noticed it again.
@@pioneercynthia1 yeah this one was only 14 stories and i was on the 8th it was bizarrely unstable theres a lot of old mine workings around here and i think the ground under it may be a bit insubstantial
😮
@@pioneercynthia1 Yeah but building that tall it's most likely intentional (that they swing a bit)
@@Rentta yes they make taller buildings have a little give so that instead of cracking it just moves slightly
Story time: In 1995, an 11 stories tall block of flats built with the LPS method in the 70's in Gdańsk, Poland, had the entire bottom floor blown out from underneath it, due to a gas leak accumulating inside overnight. The entire block was lifted slightly and then fell down on the rubble *_in one piece_* . It stood 9 stories tall after the fact.
Sounds like another Fascinating horror video. Was anyone hurt?
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the design really is an odd case of being bad, but at the same time strangely resilient. i'm amazed that when the corner of this building collapsed it didn't bring down more of the building.
@@syx3sIt depends on the angle or pressure wave of the explosion.
If the pressure wave was expanded equally around the ground floor, it's possible the whole construction would simply fall onto said floor.
On this video, the explosive force acted on one side -un equally placing pressure on one side,.
..
Have a look at shaped charges...
@@stuartd9741 natural gas explosions exert pressure more or less evenly in all directions until / unless they are funneled in a specific direction and gain momentum.
Only 4 deaths! That's actually amazing! RIP 4 souls
I wonder if any of the laborers or construction workers that erected that building moved into it after completion? I bet not...
"Should we do this properly?" "Nah, let's just fill it with our cr*p" From what I remember, there were cigarette cartons and beer cans found in the jounts when it was dismantled.
You missed a key point brought up in the video: this construction method required a minimal of skilled labor. Meaning, that the vast majority of the workers weren't qualified to work on high-rise construction (and may have had minimal to no construction experience).
They weren't being lazy. They literally had no idea what they were doing, which is on the people that hired them (and neglected to train them properly), not the workers themselves.
@@asnaghall It's not just training either. Building work needs to be supervised adequately so that the incompetent or lazy cannot cut corners. I know of a local authority housing project in the North of England which appeared to have been properly supervised, but soon after completion major cracks started to appear. It was then discovered that every time supervisors weren't present, the bricklayers were laying the bricks upside down. Why? -because if you don't have to fill the "frog" (the hollow on top of the brick) with mortar, you can lay the bricks faster and earn more bonus. In that case the local authority did sue the builders, whose excuse was that they no longer employed the bricklayers and didn't have any records as to who they were!
@@asnaghall Likely labours bought in from overseas
@@davidjones332 doesn't surprise me one bit. they've allowed cheap labour to flood the UK for years. They come in, undercut the oldschool experienced British brickie who takes pride in his work. send the money out of the country, do the job as lazily and cheaply as they can, and bugger off home where they've bought a nice big plot of land, built a house (the right way up) and live the kind of life a British worker never gets to. The same with many trades being undercut by low quality cheap work.
I don't blame the people though. they have families and lives and aren't bad people, they just want something nice for themselves like the rest of us, even if sometimes they can be a little lazy. Heck I'd go work in another country if they offered me 10x the wage for the same job I do at home
There are cracks in this country that run much deeper than a few upside down bricks and I think people are starting to see them
Vertical slums for the poor. They knew they were bad when they were built, and people did not want to live in them, they all wanted to remain in the areas being cleared away in the name of modernity.
Those buildings are just convenient filing cabinets for the poor. Its easy to hide them away from those that don't want to see them Sad!
Sometimes us poor got no choice to live in these slums. Blame the landlord or whoever is in charge of matnence and repair. (In this case, defently blame the cost cutters who built this thing. Ciggerette packages and newspapers, really?)
@@zombiedoggie2732 Image living in an old cattle barn that had been crudely turn into bedroom suits. But the good thing, I guess, is that as bad is for the first world poor it compares nothing to the third world. :(
There’s plenty of evidence that people being very excited about moving into these flats with central heating and indoor toilets, both things that were not present in many of the slums that were being cleared to make way for these tower blocks.
@@ProfessorPesca There is also plenty of evidence they wanted to remain in the same communities and not all be split up.
I love the elderly couple that moved back in. They were NOT giving up on their home over an entire collapse.
Real Eustace from Courage the Cowardly Dog energy.
“Nope. Not getting out of my chair.”
I lived there for a while after the rebuild. Empty flats were offered to the London Chest Hospital as staff accommodation. The hospital ended up with a whole floor. It was great.
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The hospital where i live was built only to last 25 years. Its nearly 40 years now. Not much improvements and the celings are falling in. There is uproar about it.
Building a *hospital*, a major infrastructure project that often takes more than a year to even complete in the first place, that only lasts 25 years is absolutely ludicrous.
Yes, many of those built with RAAC (Reinforced Aerated Aluminium Concrete) flat roofs were only designed to last 20 to 25 years. A good example is the QE II Hospital in King's Lynn, Norfolk, where hundreds of Acrow props are being used to hold up the ceiling, which is in danger of collapsing. This building was constructed in 1980, so it's already way past its sell by date. It might have cost more to construct with a gabled, tiled roof, but in the long run, it would have been far cheaper.
This was basically like building a wall of a lego house with 4x1 blocks, without interconnecting them....
What idiots.
Four bobblers we used to call them.
Good analogy!
Like a game of Jenga
It must make you feel dizzy if you live on the top floor of a tower block and take a look out the window to see the massive drop below i certainly wouldn't feel comfortable living in an apartment that high off the ground it makes it all the more difficult to escape if a fire develops in the buiding than if you live on the floors that are closer to the ground
the gas leak would make you feel extra dizzy!
Welcome to the age of the Supertall.
What's even crazier, is modern towers (2000-) sway so far for wind and.seismic load, the 60th floor can move 20 feet in any direction.
Being cheaper never pays!! We never learn do we? SMH
Save too much money, and you'll simply wind up paying twice.
Being efficient with money and resources DOES pay.
But being cheap, for nothing in return, does not.
Ummmm...I guess, when it was blamed on poor workmanship and materials , it was corruption ...someone was being cheap to PROFIT.
Greed is the cause.
In my opinion it was the shockingly shoddy work of the construction that caused Ronan Point; The Grenfell Tower tragedy was the cutting corners and under the table deals.
I expect a number of people made out like bandits cutting so many corners for profit
In the 60 all over Europe bad building engineering was common. My apprentice school in Zurich-Switzerland had ceiling heater system, we had hot heads and cold feed.
That sounds really awkward, since warm air rises up. Unless they had some heat circulation system.
Still, could be worse.
ZÜRIII WOAAAA
BESCHTI STADT IDE WELTTT!!
@@DolleHengst yeah, i don`t know, an engineer on drugs maybe. It was really dramatic because to gain a comfortable temperature on your body, they had to blow higher temperatures to reach the floor. A total mess, we had red ears and a boiling brain.
@@Lgx-ie4if Züri isch cool, nice place to be.....ZSC forever! Gruuuuss aus Barcelona.
This reminds me of the Ballymun flats in Dublin which have subsequently been demolished
That moment you realize you aren't dreaming that you're falling
This is very similar to the Champlain South Tower condo collapse in Surfside, FL, in 2021. The moral of that story is if the owners won't fix it despite all you try, save yourself and move out.
"Survivors were offered cups of tea, and brandy" that is oh so Britich, I love that country.
Half a million budget is crazy! Even for that time.
@2:27 I was in construction for 40 years and I NEVER worked with anyone pouring concrete wearing flip-flops!!!
OK, thanks for spotting that too, I thought NO damn way did I just see flip flops, sheeeesh, yep, I did.
It's not uncommon in SE Asia, where the attitude to PPE is... well practically non existent.
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Hahaha, I noticed that 😆
Me, pouring concrete in running shoes in my backyard
The fact that the culprit stove was in better condition than the building is mind boggling 😵💫
Tower blocks were appalling. Quickly became the focus of crime. Hellish to live in.
I know of one that became sheltered housing, and that can work but ONLY with a conceige and good security.
Most of them were designed to have that. However cost cutting put paid to it.
I lived in one with my parents in North Manchester, 1964 to 1981, a 12 Storey block. Then my dad became seriously ill after a stroke and we got moved to a 2 storey building, we were in the ground floor, in a 2 bed flat. 20 years later, Manchester Council sold the blocks of flats to a private developer, which erected security fencing around the area of the remaining blocks and an electronically controlled security gate, as just prior to this vandalism and arson had resulted in many of the flats lying empty. This seems to have worked, many of the flats have been sold or rented privately, also the security measures have greatly reduced instances of crime and vandalism in the area.
There was a notorious estate near me like that. One of the roughest parts of the city and was basically a local meme, there was a block of flats where we joked about being "sent to" if we failed at life.
It was demolished in mid-late 2011 and modern low-rise housing now stands on the site.
And ugly
In the late 1970s my sister applied for, and got, a flat in the Elephant and Castle area. This was under a scheme called Homesteaders or something similar.
I was terrified for them, especially when they had their first child.
It was on the thirteenth floor and I so worried about them.
They got. a house a couple of years later, and moved to their own house where they still live.
My daughter lives on the third floor of a really modern block, and there are signs everywhere about if there is a fire or other emergency to stay put. I make her promise every time I see her that if there are any problems to leave immediately.
I find it strange that rich people will spend millions of pounds on penthouses!
Me, I live on the ground floor, never lived higher than the first floor.
Even at work when I was on the sixth floor I was intensely nervous.
Seriously, keep your luxurious penthouses with views etc! I like. being. In. a bedroom where I can help out of the window.
17.04.1995 in Gdańsk, Poland, gas explosion happened in 11 floor block of flats, which resulted with collapse of underground cellars, ground floor and first floor. But despite it has similiar construction as Ronan Point, upper floors stayed almost intact, just a bit tilted. 22 residents died, and 12 were injured. it was still a great lucky, because in that house in this time were about 140 people. Buildings of this construction can be durable if they are built correctly. Interestingly, because this referes to building from 1972, from the times of socialism in Poland.
Great video. There's a documentary from 1984 by Adam Curtis which goes into the shoddy construction methods widely used at this time.
Congratulations on 1 million! Been watching since 2020 and every video is interesting and well written!
10:25 "The wing was rebuilt and reoccupied." I can't imagine moving in.
That ambulance SMK 617F was literally just two weeks old when this disaster occurred. Registered on 2nd May 1968. Random detail I know.
Many of these tower blocks also aged horribly and were starting to be pulled down by the turn of the Millennium - that is no more than 35 years. There was an estate somewhere up north that was so racked with crime and antisocial behaviour that it survived something like 12 years. In both cases, what a total waste.
You do a great job with your stories. Always interesting and great narration and not too long. Thank you! I appreciate it!
I went to that incident as I was based at Plaistow Fire Station and Ronan Point was on my fireground. I did not go to the initial incident, but later in the morning to relieve crews that were already there. I recall seeing the speed at which Ronan Point was built, about 1.5 floors per week.
This was what Monty Python's "architect sketch" was all about. Fact: all Newham's councillors were members of the "funny handshake" brigade.
[Gumby voice] "Theee -- arch-i-techt sketch!" : D
"You see I mainly design slaughterhouses ..."
Oh thank you. I was afraid I was the only one who'd made this connection
OMG, I haven't thought of this in years. 😂😂😂
*"Rotating Knives?"*
Excellent story as always. Not enough ways to say holy crap. The first residents were extremely lucky
My parents and older brother were living in the block next to Ronan Point.
They got rehoused in a nice new wimpy home in East Ham, built on an old bombsite plot of land. Crazy to think there were still lots of theses plots around well into the 1970s.
The council even helped them get a mortgage. My dad was self employed so it was pretty hard to get a mortgage back then.
Newham council were desperate to keep young families in borough, because there had been a big Exodus of young families to new towns like Harlow, Milton Keynes or Basildon.
There's a myth that immigrants pushed the locals out, but the truth is, the boomers were leaving London in droves long before that.
My parents moved into the new house in 73 and I was born in my parents bedroom a few years later. Me and my brothers had a lovely childhood in that house and we wouldn't have ended up there if it wasn't for the Ronan Point explosion.
The rebuilding of Ronan Point after the explosion led to improvements that were implemented in buildings then being constructed. Including Grenfell Tower, such that if part of the building collapsed, it would not bring the whole thing down.
I knew about Ronan Point thanks to some avid Wiki-walking in the months after the Grenfell fire, but again, thank you for covering a much lesser-known disaster in your usual sensitive and thoughtful way. You have never sought to sensationalise anything you've covered and you always bring out the improvements and good things that were implemented in the wake of each disaster you've covered. Thank you, again.
Monty Python wrote a sketch about tower blocks built by evil hypnotists.
There was another sketch regarding an abattoir design for a block of flats.
"As long as the tenants believed in the building,it would stand ". I thought of that sketch too!😀
@@Coyotek4 "er...are you proposing we slaughter our tenants?"
Flock of bats
Lol! American here. Saw the year..saw the date..and immediately linked the sketch to this incident. “Oohhh…THAT’S what inspired it!” Still one of the best sketches ever.
My aunt and uncle moved into a 5 level council block in Wembley, they had a delivery road that ran over the flats below, so their bins could be emptied and the milk delivered, needless to say the large vehicles running over the top of their flat used to wake them up every morning. The vibrations caused cracks , the kids ran riot in the roads , overturning bins etc, and the entire block was a mess after a year, they moved to another, smaller flat, which was about 4 storeys high, but at least was a better construction level and seemed like it would stay upright for a lot longer.
Wow imagine being blown out of ur bedroom high up in a tower block and only waking on the ground with a few bruises. I guess the guy must’ve been a bit shocked and surprised!
I guess the owners of the construction firm laughed all the way to the bank.
Imagine waking up with your bed on a different floor..wtf
I've heard a theory that the building couldn't have withstood the great storm in 1987, which is terrifying.
It's crazy that the building was finally demolished only a year prior to that
It is in the video. Did you watch it?
LPS buildings are still very common in eastern Germany, only they didn't have a tendency to collapse.
Yeah but dont Germans generally build stuff correctly? Comparatively speaking of course.
@@goosenotmaverick1156 we did before BER after that its downhill from now on imo.
I remember as a kid watching the construction of a tower block, it was lego like. A crane dropped housing units on top of each other building upwards. Quite fascinating and very fast.
Always look forward to a Tuesday morning video by FH
Tower blocks are and have always been aesthetically hideous and unsafe. They're an enduring symbol of classism and an erosion of dignity, privacy and freedom for people who can't afford their own property.
Oh please, should I indenture myself to build a palace for the inept and lazy? When someone else is footing the bill you get what you get and you say thank you
@@evil1by1 And that's why socialism and communism will never work beyond mere theory. I should point out to you though that nobody "gets what they get and say thank you", these ugly tower blocks just become slums, crime hubs and brothels and when they eventually fail due to gentrification or lack of proper maintenance, these "inept and lazy" people end up occupying your neighbourhood and invading your space whether you want them there or not. Usually it's in the form of tent encampments or dark alleyways. If they're mentally ill or disabled, it's beyond their own control. If they're undocumented migrants or drug/alcohol users, they may pose a safety risk to your community. Tower blocks are aesthetic eyesores and nobody living in them has any pride in upholding them because, well, why would they? The government stuck them in an ugly and unsafe living space. Ugliness begets ugliness. Greed and apathy also beget greed and apathy. An overall lack of consideration for vulnerable populations leads to a society where everybody only takes care of themselves, you can't trust your own neighbours and nobody feels safe.
@@evil1by1are you a construction worker? No? Then shut up. You won’t be doing shit and you aren’t doing shit.
@@evil1by1show us on the doll where modern society hurt you.
The working classes need houses? Right, let's throw up some Brutalist slabs and rake in those government subsidies while still cutting corners on "safety" features - safety for the poor?! Haha.
Wow, I can't believe how poorly that building was put together. RIP to those four who lost their lives.
Great video FH.
The guy on the mattress was *insanely* lucky. Goddamn. I bet he only rented bottom floor apartments from that point on in his life.... Also, only four deaths is damn near miraculous, especially considering the Storm of '87 was just the following year. And if you want poorly built apartments, the last dorm I had in college was the oldest building on campus. One night I was waiting to get a shower, and it sounded like my dorm-mate was taking *forever* so I walked in only to see that there was a literal waterfall coming *out of the wall.* I informed my RA and we went up, floor by floor, following the soaking wet walls all the way up to the top floor. The very top floor's bath was leaking, causing a cascade of leaks in everyone else's bathrooms (every floor had the exact same plan.) It did not instill much confidence in the overall structure of the building. Thankfully, it was demolished the year after I graduated and a new one was built.
Thank you for researching this problem. I didn't ever live in London but I did live in Portsdown park in Cosham Portsmouth for some time. That place was a death trap and it was finally demolish a few years after i had moved out. I lived in a flat with a sheer drop from my front door of 6 floors. the Park consisted of maisonette's three on top of each other and then a box flat on top of that which was where i had moved into, for someone who was deathly afraid of heights, it was very scary, i was even scared to go out on my balcony because it was another sheer drop from there also to the ground below next to the maisonette's were three tower blocks that were adjoined by the maisonette's most of the time the elevator did work or was under repair and when you are newly pregnant having to walk up 8 flights of stairs, was more than hard work. The person who designed the park was also the same designer of the Tricorn parking structure in Commercial Road, Portsmouth, which has always been an ugly white elephant but it is still in use today, which is very scary as it has been there since the 1960 or 70's, it has always been an absolute eye sore, to say the least. In the park were also single homes and row houses which were much safer in my opinion. Portsdown park was torn down from the tower blocks top floor to the ground as they worked, it would have been far quicker to use dynamite in my opinion. The council is notoriously known for cutting corners and being tight with funds for the tenants that have no choice but to live in these death traps, Queen Alexandra hospital was right across the street literally. the counsel needs to be taken to task over their management practices, they are not very good at fixing the problems that arise in their buildings they own and they give the tenants a really hard time when they do need something fixing. But they are quite happy to kick you out of their buildings if you miss a payment or too or social services were not paying your rent when they were supposed to be. Then the Grenville tower fire was just horrific, all to save money and using materials that were not fire safe was just criminal. I hope they pulled that building down and put a memorial in its place. the amount of people that were killed in that fire. it was criminal. I don't know how the council keeps getting away with that stuff. Its not the first fire they have had in their buildings. Whom ever was the Architect's and Engineer's working for the council and over seeing the build, need to have criminal charges laid against them, it was criminal to cut corners on safety. Its a shame more people cannot afford to buy their own places. I know if i could have afforded to buy my own place i would have done so. I live far far away from any council now and i wont loose sleep over that move. Cutting corners and over charging in rent makes life more difficult for people to pick and choose where they live, When the council offers you a place you are advised to take what they give you or your right back to the bottom of a waiting list. i am sure that still hasn't changed and i left the UK in 1990. Am i shocked by this research not in the slightest its typical council no mater where you live in the UK you will get an unsafe building or its damp and moldy cracks in the ceilings and walls windows are drafty back gates don't close properly and no escape if your walkway outside your door collapses substandard housing is a common thing because they can keep getting away with stuff like this now all that money wasted on building that crap could have gone to build better homes to give families help in getting them into their own houses not to gouge people of their hard earned money so they cannot save up to buy their own homes. I am glad i left when i did. There is a really nice housing estate there the last time i was in the UK that was in 2019. I have no faith in the councils in the UK they will never do things the right way and the safe way they will always cut costs go for the lowest bids and cut corners every chance they get. this is the way the council operates and this is also why they need to be under new management with structure and safety without cutting corners and grace periods when financial help is not cooperating with the tenants. They will never change until they are charged and people go to prison for their incompetence and neglect of peoples safety. and stop gouging the tenants for their substandard accommodation. Great video can't wait for the next one. Great job!
Ah, the stove survived. No harm done, then!
Better quality than the building.
Hey! I just wanted to say thank you for all the videos and the time you put into them. They are very informative and educational and i enjoy passing my spare time watching these. Ive learned quite a bit.
Wow, the guy on the mattress!?! Amazing work as always.
This reminds me of what happened in Surfside, FL 😢!
Same 😢
When you build on the cheap….you get what you pay for.
I used to live in Kidderminster and 2 tower blocks on Hoo Rd used same construction. They were evacuated after this incident but not demolished instead they were empty for a number of years, but then they where refurbished and removed some of the upper floors, they are still in use today
I dunno why, but I've grown to love this format of story telling.
You're probably my favorite crow (or raven, sorry can't tell from pic) on TH-cam.
My favorite part is always how you conclude your videos. Love the takeaways and the music, really stays true to the tone.
This is good stuff. Keep it up.
Your videos are very good.
Love from India.
I grew up in a tower block on Butchers Road. This has never been far from my mind.
The mystery series “Endeavour” based an episode on this.
Did gas in the UK not have mercaptan added? It was added in the US after the New London School explosion in 1937. You’d have noticed the smell in an enclosed space.
It would of been gas made from coal back then and did have a strong smell
If she was sleeping in the next room, her nose may have become used to the smell before she walked into the kitchen. "Nose-blindness"
Yes, in those days they would have been using town's gas, a 50:50 mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, both of which are combustible, explosive gases but have no odour. Mercaptan would have been added at a few parts per million to enable any leaks to be detected by a sense of smell.
LMFAOOOO flying out on a mattress sound asleep is the funniest thing ever
The man still on his bed that's crazy
Mattress brand should have used it for ads.
That’s a story to tell down the pub course no one would believe him most likely !
This is the exact same construction I witnessed as young boy in the mid to late 1960's in Seven Sisters Road, Tottenham. They knocked down perfectly good Victorian houses, homing well-established hard-working families. The tower blocks were then populated by people from heaven-knows-where, who brought nothing but trouble. It's also when I learnt the word suicide, as the towers provided an unequivocal method when jumped off. By 1969 Tottenham had descended into a ghetto, so we moved out to a leafy suburb in Hertfordshire. These places may have looked utopian vision of the future as architect models and drawings in planning meetings, but they delivered a social sub-culture disaster that still exists today.
Excellent film, really well explained.
From Ronan Point to Grenfell, you can see why many Brits don't want to live in tower blocks. Unlike in alot of other countries where tower bkocks have a decent reputation, and high rise living is sought after; that's not the case in the UK, where tower blocks have generally never had a good reputation, and most people certainly do not 'aspire' to live in one.
Where possible we prefer a house.... and even better if it has a garden aswell. Brits like their houses and gardens, and do not wish to swap them for high rise living.
Unfortunately, they have become a 'depository' for the urban poor. Whether this was intentional is up for debate, but that's how they're seen here in the UK.
Luxury high rise living is for those in other countries - not for us Brits. Of course there are luxury tower bkocks here too, but they remain largely unpopular, and many flats in them are never occupied..... remaining empty or just a property 'asset' for someone who living in Qatar or the Far East.
As tragic as it was for those who were killed, it's amazing that only 4 people died...could have been much worse.
My parents' depression era house had newspaper as insulation, which we discovered when doing a renovation. They filled joints in a HI-RISE with it? Hmmm... I wonder why it fell down...AND THEY DIDN'T LEARN! Not stupid. Criminal. 'Hey, granny, I know it's hard for you to get out but could you come to OUR house for Christmas? I don't want my kids in your hi-rise...'
The workers were. Let's just say, 'not good'. When the block was dismantled, cigarette cartons, newspapers and beer cans were found in the joints. The workers were boozed up and couldn't be bothered to do their jobs to any degree. Unfortunately they got away with it.
If the block had been built properly, it would have been very different.
Newspaper is a remarkably good insulator against the cold. Think of old movies where you might see hoboes or drunks sleeping rough using newspapers as blankets. My late father, a policeman, worked an assignment as a decoy where he had to pretend to sleep on a bench and he used a newspaper to cover himself. He said it kept him quite warm. But, you don't use the newspaper in place of mortar, or concrete, or better insulating materials which are also fireproof. And you certainly don't use it as a filler when the different parts of a building should not have gaps between them!
Informative an scary an unintentionally funny, wild that the guy with the mattress was ok.
The stove still worked after the explosion and dozen-story fall? Geez, they sure as heck don't build 'em like that anymore!
Web is really the person we long to have in every city --someone who loos at these frightening building issues and raises the alarmabout widespead danger to prevent who-knows-how-many deaths from similar issues. There was a lot of injury here and some death, and I don't want to minimize any lifelong disability that came out of this, but the human cost could have been wildly greater. Nice to see that he saw that and devoted time and energy to fixing as many similar disasters as he could before they happened. It's not often we have the record of these individual lagacies of people using their expertise to save lives, even though such work is usually hard going and they could do something easier at any moment. Such people should have monuments.
Love your videos!!
I remember seeìng this on Plainly Difficult, i love seeing things like this covered by multiple channels.
Tuesday morning is literally the only thing I have to live for.
No pressure on Mr. Fascinating, eh?😂 I'm p excited I got this a mere 2 minutes after its birth 🎉
Tuesday evening in my Hemisphere 🤔... Love this channel, but I think you might need a hobby... 😊
Not sure if your comment is fan girl hyperbole,,, or a darker revelation...just hope you find something to help if you're in a bit of a dark place ❤✌️
you need Jesus
There's lots of other good documentary channels. Try Plainly Difficult and Mentour Pilot. For something different try Coral City Camera, it is in Miami so there's only anything to see daytime Miami but it also has a really friendly chatroom. Also try Live From Iceland multiview, it is looking at the area of recent eruptions in Iceland and another is due any day, the chatroom will pop up when an eruption is imminent. Going off TH-cam, Zooniverse has a wonderful selection of projects using crowdsourcing to study wildlife.
Damn the panning downward at 4:00 was the most terrifying part. The height, the monotony
Completely unrelated to the story, but what a nice mural at 12:05
That guy who casually took an interest saved so many lives.
Always looking forward to notifications. 👍
And STILL in 2017 Grenfell Tower BURNED because of SHODDY, “Cheap and Quick” Construction in the application of outside Cladding!! Tragic!
Like a deck of cards, pancaking and crumbling
I work in the mechanical field and often handle gas appliances. It is so easy to mishandle gas fittings and it is extremely important to take the extra care when working with gas equipment. I can recall a time where my co-worker neglected to properly test for gas leakage, and when showing up the next day to complete the job, I was immediately hit with a VERY strong smell of natural gas that the home owners had no idea existed. As it turns out, people don't notice subtle gas fume accumulation. Please take care, if you interact with such equipment.
Fun fact: This system of large scale panel housing was also very common in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, since those countries were suffering from huge housing shortages after WWII, and the communist governments needed a way to provide housing as quick and cheap as possible. If you travel to any city within Central or Eastern Europe, or within the ex-USSR countries, you'll find these kinds of apartment buildings everywhere. This has unfortunately garned the system's reputation of being a "communist" style of construction, with many people saying that the buildings look ugly and repetetive, and citing it as a reason that we should go back to building classical style buildings (I.E buildings that Europe used to build in the 19th and 20th centuries), at least according to some city planning TH-camrs I've seen. Personally, I don't mind this kind of architecture, so long as it's maintained well and not left to rot for all eternity (which is why a lot of these buildings nowadays look rough and abandoned). In fact, countries like Germany and Poland are going through major gentrification projects on their panel apartments, such as giving them a new coat of paint and removing those weird covered balconies that didn't really serve any purpose other than a storage closet.
The balconies are good for fresh air.
In former Czechoslovakia thousands of those buuildings were built in 70s and 80s, but they were actually designed with Ronan point disaster in mind. They are disigned so thet outside wall panels aren't part of the structural system. In case of a large explosion they are supposed to be blown away, but the structure should remain standing. For example, this happened Slovakia in 2019 - a massive gas explosion, way stronger than Ronan point one, but the building didn't collapse.
P.S. However, I don't think this applies to all countries of former Eastern Block!!!
Grenfell wouldn’t have killed 73 people if it hadn’t been gentrified with flammable panels.
In terms of aesthetics, bare concrete and sheetrock look OK when new, and don't hold up too bad in a dry climate, but quickly become stained and horrible after a few years of damp weather. Their insulating properties also aren't great.
Yes - neither LPS construction nor high rise tower blocks doesn't have to be either ugly or unsafe. Done properly they can give people good housing in which they can lead good lives. Doing these things properly only takes a little more money, but when your country is poor and needs lots of housing in a hurry the temptation to skimp becomes very strong.
I remember it like it was yesterday. Unbelievable shortcuts.