rusty railings in Cadogan Square

[stuart noble]

Just cos you flat's worth 3 million quid doesn't mean anybody maintains anything

[DerbyBorn]

stuart noble wrote in news:j5Mbw.787200$ [e-mail]:

Would anyone realistically, check such decorative railing. How would you do it without breaking them. ?3m is based on the location premium - not the quality of the fixtures.

All the people who criticise H&S will possibly be wondering why a risk assessment wasn't done. Surely penny pinching on the removal method was the problem. Proper lifting equipment should have been used.

[Nightjar]

Old cast iron is notoriously unreliable. Its strength depends a lot upon the quality of the casting. It can be checked for flaws, but that isn't something the average removal man is going to be able to do.

I do wonder how large and heavy the sofa was, if it could not be carried up (or down) the stairs.

[Onetap]

And it's crap for bending or tensile loads; see Tay Bridge.

It looks like they may have tied ropes to the railing to haul the couch up, putting bending stresses on the railing uprights which appear to have broken off near the floor.

[Tim Watts]

On 21/11/14 19:39, "Nightjar

[charles]

[Tim Watts]

Having worked in Kensington, removals are quite often made via a balcony.

However, the ones I've seen have used proper lifting platforms.

[John Rumm]

[Andrew Gabriel]

News said they were on the ground underneath, when the sofa and railings landed on top of them. If the railings were the anchor for the pulley, they would have had twice the weight of the sofa on them.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

This is the penalty for not paying any attention to basic pulleys in physics.

[Scott M]

According to something I read, the deeds have prohibitions on going through communal areas to avoid damage and that furniture flying in and out of windows is the norm.

[newshound]

Perhaps they were standing out of the way of the sofa but not the railings (I guess these could have weighed more than the sofa).

[tony sayer]

It said in one report that one of them was impaled on the railings ..Poor sod;(..

You'd think that someone would have done a risk assessment on this somewhere?. Also if they don't let them take it thru the front door and up the stairs, how do floors higher up get their furniture in?

Doesn't seem to make much sense...

[Adrian]

Yeh, I'd sort of assumed that, given that they were killed by one floor of fall/drop.

Pics show the casualty tent on the pavement, and the sofa balanced between wall and (intact/pavement-side) railings, so the sofa almost certainly didn't land on them.

[Tim Watts]

Nasty.

Without meaning any disrespect to the victims and the families, I'm thinking this was a removal being done on the cheap - possibly only one item, so someone didn't want to pay for lifting equipment hire.

The usual equipment I've seen for this job in Kensington is a motorised platform that rides up a ramp (like a long ladder).

The "ladder" is driven up to the building, a few metres back and extended/tilted until it meets the entrance point.

Then quite a sizeable horizontal platform (sofa sized plus some) is driven up and down the "ladder" and it's all quite safe.

Once set up it is probably capable of heavier lifts compared to a cherry picker - and does not need a skilled operator to make the same movements over and over.

[Tim Watts]

Perhaps in the light of this, a law needs to be passed voiding all such lease terms.

Whilst it might actually be easier for a full removal to go in and out of the window *with the correct lifting platform*, it is completely stupid to prevent a simple delivery of a couple of large items from going up the stairs.

Unless of course the stairs are so narrow and twisty that it's not possible.

[charles]

small crane - that 's the way pianos were lifted into upstairs rooms at Cambridge in the 1950s/60s.

[BobH]

Its all assumptions and maybes yet. Wait until you know the facts before assuming anything.

[Roland Perry]

In message , at 10:32:58 on Sat, 22 Nov

2014, Scott M remarked:

In the Netherlands where the older housing is famously narrow and with very steep staircases, they routinely use special lifts for delivering furniture through the windows. Here's one from the UK:

[damduck-egg]

One of my Grans used to clean a similar flat about 55 years ago for a singer who had lived there since the thirties when she had been quite well known, Full of Art deco stuff ISTR. What I do remember was that communal access inside had a lift ,one of those with lattice gates and the stairs went around the outside of the lift column so there were lots of corners so not impossible but possibly akward though the flat in in the incident wouldn't be far up. The singer had a Grand Piano so that got up somehow. Maybe 50 years on with fashions moving to larger bathrooms and designer Kitchens it is the internal access to hall area that has become awkward.

G.Harman