The Tragic Story of The Lakanal House Tower Block Disaster

Comments · 844

• LW

  @lwoods507 · 1 year ago

  High-rise Maisonettes are just so wildly confusing at the best of times, I cannot imagine how desperately disorientating it must have been for those firefighters in smoke-filled, unmarked corridors and stairs.

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• AN

  @annareverie13 · 1 year ago

  My tower block still has the Stay Put rule in place. When asked if this was still appropriate, housing managers said “yes, unless you’re at risk from smoke or heat obviously”. We have vents connecting the bathrooms of every flat and mine smells of weed every time the bloke five floors down has a smoke… so yeah, I will NOT be staying put in the event of a fire.

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• SI

  @sirmalus5153 · 1 year ago

  My father worked as a bricky on the Jersey Marine (near Swansea) council flats building in the 1960&apos;s. <br><br>He and the other workers told the bosses the flats they were building were all slums befor they were even finished. They were ignoed of course. &nbsp;The architects seemed to not have the slightest clue how people would actually live, or behave in the buildings.<br><br>There wasn&apos;t any method of food waste or rubbish handling on a daily basis, other than either taking rubbish bins (there were no black plastic bags back then) down to the outside of the building youself, or throwing it off the balconies.<br><br>Guess which method became popular with residents as the years passed. When they were demolished years later, my father was actually pleased, all day.<br><br>That&apos;s how ashamed he had been working on that particular job.

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• DA

  @Damien.D · 1 year ago

  &quot;maisonette&quot; is a french word for &quot;cute little house&quot;, typically in the countryside, surrounded by a garden.<br>Glad to know that in the UK, it&apos;s about a dystopian tower block with dark hallways, maze-like structure, with many dark corners all equipped with shady beef dealers, the whole thing being clad in asbestos.<br>Side♩ , the inventor of the tower block made of intertwined two story apartments is the french architect LeCorbusier. He&apos;s also the precursor of brutality style. Sorry about that.

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• TI

  @tiltedstudio · 1 year ago

  So basically every single thing that happened in Grenfell had already happened in Lakanal a full 8 years prior, and not a damn thing was done about any of it? Fabulous.

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• TE

  @Teverell · 1 year ago

  There&apos;s a BBC documentary that I believe is still available on YouTube titled The Fires That Foretold Grenfell. This is one of those. One of the six people who died was told, over the 40 minutes or so that she was on the phone with the 999 operator, to stay put. She died of smoke inhalation while waiting for rescue when she had more than enough time to get out had she ignored what she was told. It must have affected that operator horribly to know that the advice she gave ended up killing the woman she was speaking to, who trusted her and what she was told.<br><br>The scissor-type arrangement of the Lakanal House flats was incredibly confusing to the firefighters - it&apos;s pretty confusing to people reading up on this fire who haven&apos;t come across that arrangement before.<br><br>Thank you for covering this.

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• CH

  @chrismoore600 · 1 year ago

  As a Firefighter Paramedic I will tell you never ask permission to keep yourself safe. I would call 999 from outside of the building. Listening to the dispatcher was a big fail.

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• FA

  @fashionistaandpink · 1 year ago

  i really don&apos;t trust the logic behind staying put because it relies too heavily upon businesses not cutting corners and being negligent.

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• FA

  @FayeVert · 1 year ago

  &quot;There are no new lessons to be learned from this fire, only old lessons that tragically went unheeded&quot; - Percy Bugbee, after the Our Lady of the Angels fire in Chicago, 1954

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• LE

  @leslieross8708 · 1 year ago

  This makes me even madder about Grenfell. If they&apos;re not going to yank that deadly cladding down from the remaining blocks,they should at least revise the stay in place recommendations. It clearly doesn&apos;t work in these firetraps. This could happen again at any moment and there doesn&apos;t appear to be any plans to change it. I&apos;m in the US but sat up all night watching the horror of Grenfell, hoping against hope they&apos;d be able to get those poor people out of that inferno. Yet, after both these tragedies, they&apos;ve done nothing but hold a pointless inquest.

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• KA

  @kawaiiarchive357 · 1 year ago

  This flat complex looks and sounds like a 4D rat maze.

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• DE

  @DeskaFolf · 1 year ago

  The fact that he said this script was written on July 3rd, almost 2 months ago, gives some insight to the amount of time and effort he puts into these videos.

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