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Introductory section should cover responsibility[edit]
I think the introductory section of the article should conclude with a sentence indicating who was ultimately held responsible for the fire. Or, if no one has yet been held responsible, it should clearly state that. Right now this omission is quite glaring. Reading the "Investigations" section, I believe nobody has been held responsible yet, but I am actually not certain. 90.240.154.167 (talk) 19:22, 25 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This is taking several years and will be a work in progress for some time. David Crayford☎ 14:08, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Something in the inquiry testimony we should add to the article down the road[edit]
I noticed that Professor Jose Torero testified in June 2022 before the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry on the difference between American and British construction codes. Unfortunately, unless someone knows of a reliable source that has already reported this point, I can't cite it directly in the article because that would be first publication of original research. I'm identifying this issue now, so that if this point does show up in press coverage or the inquiry's final Phase 2 report, we can add this to the article.
The relevant testimony can be found here on pages 100 to 124 of the transcript.
The exchange on page 128 (page 33 of the PDF) is the best explanation I've seen to date of the key difference between the prescriptive American approach and the functional British approach. --Coolcaesar (talk) 10:08, 27 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This is interesting, but why is the difference relevant in UK jurisdiction?
A lot of press coverage after the fire implied that the UK could have prevented Grenfell Tower by adopting the NFPA 285 test and making it mandatory for high-rise construction. The point of Torero's testimony is that it would have not. It's our rigidly prescriptive building culture which best explains why the United States has not sustained a mass casualty incident from an accidental high-rise structure fire since 1980. (The fires in 1986 and 2006 were deliberately set.)
A key point that is implicit in the exchange I cited is that the US assumes that most design professionals (both in manufacturing and construction) either do not have a thorough understanding of fire science or are too busy doing their regular jobs to stay on top of the latest science. The US approach is to convene the top experts every few years and bake their consensus expertise into a fresh version of the building codes. Then everyone else is trained to mechanically follow or enforce the codes, to place their trust in the experts, and to blame the codes (when clients want to do certain things and the codes won't allow them).
In contrast, the UK functional approach grants broad discretion to design professionals, but with great power comes great responsibility. It will be interesting to see if the Phase 2 inquiry report goes into that issue and whether it recommends a conversion to a prescriptive approach, or in lieu of that, improving training and regulation of UK design professionals. --Coolcaesar (talk) 22:20, 1 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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