Rescue from a Firey Fate !

In June 2017, Australians were mesmerised by breaking news scenes from London where a towering apartment block was becoming a flaming pyre on the city skyline.  What was unusual about this inferno was that the fire was creeping up the outside of the building and terrified residents could be seen at their windows as the fire crept closer.

That was the " Grenfell Tower " tragedy that left seventy-two residents dead.  The inquest that followed revealed details that sent reverberations around the world. This tower block was recently renovated and its exterior was clad with a combination of aluminium and urethane panelling which was highly flammable.

It seems a very containable fire broke out in a lower floor apartment and escaped through a window, setting alight the exterior cladding and quickly moving to higher floors which were beyond the reach of the ladders brought by the fire brigades.  In keeping with fire safety rules, residents were ordered to stay in their apartments and await rescue.  The blackened shell of the building remains on the London skyline as a grim reminder to apartment dwellers world wide.

Unfortunately, this cladding has been used in many other world countries and it is fairly prevalent here in Australia.  It is illegal to clad a residential building with a flammable cladding and fire safety regulations demand that where this is in place it must be removed and replaced.  The dominant issue is who picks up the tab for the cost of this work  ?

Next month it will be two years since that London tragedy and there are many buildings here with that flammable cladding still in place.   In the majority of cases, the cost of rectification which will run into millions of dollars will fall on the shoulders of apartment owners.  They simply lack the ability to pay - and the work remains undone.

The news from London is that the British government has now agreed to foot the bill for the removal of this cladding and its replacement with a safer product on 170 privately owned apartment blocks at a cost of $372 million.  It seems that the government recognised that this financial catastrophe was something beyond the ability of ordinary people to pay and it could not stand aside and let citizens live at risk of another Grenfell fire terror.

There are hundreds of Australians who go to sleep at night in buildings with a similar fire risk. Should that rectification fall on the buildings owners or the building firms that did the construction, many would be forced to seek bankruptcy protection and the risk cost would descend on individual apartment owners who bought their homes in good faith.   This decision in Britain will put pressure on the Australian government to take a similar measure and pick up the tab for rectification costs.

We can not go on indefinitely with this fire risk in place.  We have had several fire scares since the Grenfell disaster and thankfully none have resulted in loss of life, but simply relying on good luck is not a sustainable option.  It seems that only the government has the deep pockets to rescue innocent apartment owners from living with the risk of a firey death or total financial insolvency.