That is not at all what he said though.
He said that he had spent the weekend reading the report and spoke of the present not the past when talking about evacuating ("would" not "would have"). He was clearly talking about what anyone with common sense would do *now*, with the knowledge of what happened at Grenfell.
Of course the opposition deliberately skewed it and jumped all over it, forcing him to issue an apology for something that was only offensive when misinterpreted.
SteveW
That's no excuse. Even if the same thing happened now, he's telling people to ignore the fire brigade and evacuate themselves, even if the fire brigade know that they will all die because of smoke in the stair wells. Arrogant, irresponsible and stupid.
In message <1ogm4yu.c6k48o1ta9jh0N% snipped-for-privacy@hayter.org, at 12:43:20 on Wed, 6 Nov 2019, Roger Hayter snipped-for-privacy@hayter.org remarked:
Notwithstanding the "you'll inevitably die" claim, the majority of Grenfell residents did in fact escape OK.
The ones most at risk of not succeeding were the ones who stayed far too long before making the decision to leave. I accept that having stayed too long, their chances of an escape were significantly diminished.
Well yes, it seems to be accepted that they should have been evacuated sooner. I am talking about a hypothetical future fire the characteristics of which we don't know, but in which we are assured by Rees Mogg we should ignore fire brigade advice.
At last, someone prepared to accept the LFB have some responsibility for being late in changing their advice.
While it's politically incorrect to say so, fire brigades do have a track record of blundering when it comes to large fires. Another was the Liverpool Echo.
Cherry picking failures from a very large number of successes is hardly a "track record of blundering".
That said, I agree that the latest criticisms seem well founded.
Big fires are unpredictable and chaotic. I think fire brigades do need to operate with well defined and understood rules and principles, and a strong command and control structure. In this particular case they were let down because they assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that large residential buildings in the UK would meet building regs and therefore would contain fires, leaving the biggest threat as smoke inhalation if you enter a central stairwell.
In message snipped-for-privacy@brightview.co.uk>, at
12:55:36 >At fighting fires in big public buildings? Perhaps there are non-compliant tower blocks and multi-storey car parks going up in flames all the time, being put out, and they never make the news?
The command and control on the night (as well as the long term lessons of Lakanal not being learnt) was remiss in not understanding that the fire had quite clearly *not* been contained, within minutes of arriving.
That is at odds with the inquiry report which includes:
(a) "National guidance requires fire and rescue services to draw up contingency evacuation plans for dealing with fires in high-rise buildings that spread beyond the compartment of origin causing a ?stay put? strategy to become untenable" and
(b) "LFB continued to rely on the ?stay put? strategy in place for Grenfell Tower which was not questioned, notwithstanding all the early indications that the building had suffered a total failure of compartmentation."
You are mistaken.
RFC 2119 "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels" defines the meaning of those words in RFCs:
... 3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
...
(One might note the choice of words in the introduction to RFC 2119: "This document defines these words as they should be interpreted in IETF documents.")
-- Richard
And that's why I said the criticisms were well founded.
Nevertheless, rather than having a committee meeting at every single fire to discuss and debate exactly what they were going to do bearing in mind the local circumstances, there is a lot to be said for having a few relatively strong and simple rules for the front line guys, including the first line management, to follow. Obviously, with hindsight they were too slow to recognise tha loss of containment. We learn from mistakes. Everyone should have been alerted to the 737-Max problem by the first crash (if not to the earlier warnings). But they were not, it took a second crash. That's still not quite "a track record of blundering".
I've already said I agree with the inquiry report. LFB failed effectively to cascade down what they knew higher up in the organisation.
Chrome works fine with that unusual style for me.
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