Ot: Or not. tower fire...

They didn't.

In this case it might be proved to be penny wise pound foolish. All to easy to get any job done more cheaply if you don't care about the end result. And if going to tender on a job and always picking the cheapest one regardless, there's a very good chance corners will be cut. And since you no longer have the pros to check the job has been done properly, you don't know until the worst happens.

Gosh, the cheapest tender got picked? Wow that's the first time that happened in all the history of everything.

Aren't there rules also that mandate that the cheapest tender be picked?

Only if it meets the specification of the contract.

That's obvious. Or are you saying that the local handyman offered to do it all for cash-in-hand?

There is nothing in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey.

In article , Dave Plowman (News) scribeth thus

A while ago I had to do some work for a bit of the NHS. In that they had to get a few quotes from external suppliers for any work they wanted doing.

They got a quote from a very respectable firm of electricians that came out at an hourly rate some 20% less than their own works dept could do.

So external contactor got the work. So what happens to your blokes when they didn't get the work?

They just sit around doing any odd jobs i can find for them came the reply from the works manager.

Who was in a very good pay scale, better than i expect the manager of the external contactor..

Perhaps Mr Streater buys everything purely by price. It would explain a great deal.

I'm not a local authority or gumment dept. At least I wasn't when I looked this morning.

I'm told (by a housing lawyer) that the K+C TMO is, in effect, an ALMO. Which does suggest that they could have had far more say over the works than I thought.

No - it shouldn't work that way, at least in the public sector. Things like quality-related variables should be factored in. Even in the days of compulsory tendering (CCT).

Often, though, they're not - many quite senior managers jump to same conclusion as you.

In message , at 22:16:58 on Mon, 19 Jun

The rooms are similar, but the amount of modification, retrofitting water pipes, guaranteed power source etc is much greater, and wouldn't scale to a tower block as well as a conventional system. I expect they have a much higher annual maintenance cost (including gaining access to each flat), and being complicated no doubt a shorter service life.

Sorting out the testing regime so that such flammable composites as Raynobond PE cannot pass the fire test as Class 0 would help. I have a bad feeling that what happened was permitted by UK building codes (and might have been prevented by following EU fire test standards).

Same with the Australian one - although they only really only got away with it because the sprinkler system performed way beyond specification to serve all the rooms adjacent to the vertical pillar of fire. Water pressure drops if too many sprinklers and hydrants are active at once.

I haven't seen that many road accidents caused just by "bad road design"

- they are almost invariably caused by a driver making a bad decision and moving into the path of traffic they either haven't seen or have not appreciated how quickly it was travelling. The sight lines on some junctions may be far from perfect but the main problem is the drivers.

There is one not far from me where a lot of bent metal glancing incidence collisions occur. Trunk road exit slip joins the road at a very narrow angle which at rush hour lines up with the rising sun for a fair chunk of the year. But there are no KSIs so nothing gets done.

The next step after Armco is that they add solid steel girder reinforced concrete to protect particularly vulnerable roadside properties. eg.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@54.3639353,-1.3343793,3a,75y,260.87h,110.58t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1syjNSY-G6mQjeYO9BAs5A_A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

On a notorious stretch of the A684. Other roads nearby have had their share of "please go round the bend" events too. eg.

Another guy had a car land on his garage roof (no picture).

Although I don't like chicane traffic calming measures I think they are a lot better than insane shared ambiguous pedestrian and car mixed zones. The sharp edges on that central reservation are particularly nasty but to roll a car I reckon you need at least 40mph (or a damn big spring piston underneath like they use for Hollywood SFX).

perhaps I should have said " a road design unsuitable for modern volumes of traffic". But, it's the difference in attitude between public bodies and private businesses that I object to. H&S requirements mean that things have to be totally idiot proof eg a sign saying 'do not go too close to the edge' is deemed to be inadeaquate - a barrier needs to be there too. Two locations in our village are deemed to be unsafe by the local county highways engineer - he can't even get money to erect a sign!

En el artículo , Martin Brown escribió:

I saw an article that claims that the Dubai tower has had sprinklers retrofitted to the outside of the building, at the top, specifically to deal with the case of the cladding catching fire. Can dig out a link if interested.

How does it get inside the rain screen?