Executives who sold combustible insulation for use on Grenfell Tower perpetrated a “fraud on the market” by rigging a fire test and making “misleading” claims about it, a public inquiry has heard.
Celotex, a subsidiary of the French construction materials company Saint-Gobain, behaved in a “completely unethical” way, admitted Jonathan Roper, a former assistant product manager.
— The Guardian
13 Comments
This, of course, makes a larger point that the neo-liberal idea that companies ought to police themselves is completely misguided.
Seems more Libertarian than neo-liberal, but hey.
I don't think that this is a Libertarian notion, since there is still the expectation that some form of governing, albeit weak, takes place. In my mind it is shifting the responsibility of control onto companies with the purpose of cutting costs and slimming down the state.
(Hi Thomas!) This inquiry is so eye-opening. Should be required reading for architecture interns. It's rare that a real-world scenario occurs at such catastrophic and tragic scale, exposing the workings of the construction industry, manufacturers, and standards-setting bodies, and the role architects play (mostly as consumer/spectator) in that. It brings detailing and specification into such sharp focus. Thanks Archinect for posting about it.
Hi George, There is a lot to unpack here and I agree with you.
I used the word neo-liberal, because I wanted to point to the larger philosophy underneath it all, and I don't think the word libertarian @b3tadine catches this. At the heart of the neglect that befell Grenfell is a wider issue of governance. Naturally, the superstructure that controls and sets standards, the construction industry, manufacturers, etc. are all culpable in some way, but the bottom line for me is that the carefully planned attack on governance, (by way of austerity politics and cuts, the privatization of government roles), is the main culprit. This was a culmination of deeply damaging policies pursued towards council housing since Thatcher's administration.
The decision to reclad was made mainly because it was felt that the social housing block was an eyesore to the neighbors in a predominantly rich area. The way in which the original building was designed is that the concrete spandrels and party walls were supposed to contain the fire to a single apartment if it broke out. Hence, there was only one core in the building. When this highly combustible cladding material was added, these fire-barriers were negated. Apart from the code and specification issues and manufacturing issues (fraud), there was nobody in the design team who flagged this up, because everybody looked at their task very narrowly. There was no more institutional memory. People now forget that these buildings were originally built by government architects and that councils at the time had their own building departments. Those departments were also, by the way, policing what was being built. I dare to assert that this would not have happened if this larger governmental structure and civic body had not been excised under the austerity regime of the last decades.
An interesting read to appreciate what has been lost in the process is Municipal Dreams - The Rise and Fall of Council Housing by John Boughton.
Thank you for this concise explanation. It's an infuriating set of circumstances that led to this tragedy. I'm hoping to see it all come out into the light and manifest in change that relegate "austerity" practices to oblivion. Caring about others is what makes a strong society.
Will be interesting to see if this forces any change in product disclosures, or liability for architects. I don't doubt that there was some fine print somewhere that indicated the material passes the testing only in the configuration as tested, but whether that was communicated or apparent to architects and contractors that they have to match the configuration exactly is perhaps the question. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
I've seen plenty of test reports or code evaluation reports for NFPA 285 tested assemblies (for US construction) that include some specific window/opening flashing details to pass the testing (usually a heavy gauge steel flashing over mineral wool fire blocking), but that detail hardly ever makes it into the window and opening details in the contract documents. I'm not suggesting this is the same type of issue that Celotex finds themselves in here, but I do think they are related.
It would not surprise me if Celotex is able to point to some fine print disclosures in their literature and get out from under this legally by putting the liability for not following the disclosures on the architect or contractor.
And hopefully the legal system treats that with the same disdain they generally do when tech companies bury important information under millions of words in a EULA.
I'd generally agree, but I don't think it helps to compare the two. An EULA is an agreement where the user is at a clear disadvantage and there is probably not a larger public HSW component. As architects we are licensed, learned professionals with a duty to HSW. Where a tech company might have a duty to not take advantage of their users and the law might protect the users in that relationship, don't we as architects have a duty to understand what we design and specify to protect HSW?
On these types of assembly tests where even changing one material could mean the difference between passing and failing, or increasing the air space could mean the difference between passing and failing, or omitting some flashing could mean the difference between passing and failing ... do we have a responsibility per our standard of care and duty to HSW to understand the conditions under passing occurs? Is it our responsibility to seek out and understand these conditions?
Is it the manufacturers' (there are usually multiple involved in this type of testing) responsibility to educate the architects and contractors of the conditions ... or to check on every project where their products are installed to ensure proper installation to ensure the conditions are met? Is it the contractor's responsibility to ensure the conditions are met?
Yes. When they are creating materials, then inventing assemblies in order to sell Architects on using them, then representing to the testing agencies AND the Architects what the proper use case is for, if it's not immediately and clearly indicated how to make it safe they are responsible. If there is a detail that, if not done right, puts the HSW at risk, they have a responsibility to give guidance. You can't just put out a flammable foam in a sandwich, post some pretty pictures, and then forget to make a clear and obvious indication about where it can and cannot be used. If that information is buried in page 16 of 135 of the installation guide, it's no different than a EULA.
I am not saying we do not have a responsibility or culpability, but we are human and the legal standard is that which the AVERAGE architect provides. If shit's buried or unavailable, then that's well beyond the standard required by law, IMO.
It would be helpful to have more detail I presume.
The Guardian article seems to key in on the addition of "concealed fire-retardant panels" to the second assembly that was able to then pass the testing parameters, whereas the first assembly without that material wasn't. The article identifies the added material as magnesium oxide (MgO) board and the former employee's claim is that he was told to bury that the first assembly failed and not to disclose the MgO board was added.
The timeline of the testing described in the article doesn't match the test report I was able to pull up, but regardless, it shows a passing assembly including 12-mm thick MgO sheathing board. I don't know what the overall assembly for either test described in the article entails, nor do I know exactly what the assembly was for the Grenfell Tower, but I do know that most architects understand that this type of fire testing on an assembly needs to be configured the same in the final condition as it was for the testing to be able to claim it will perform similarly.
If the manufacturer provides the information in the testing reports and certifications to the architect, is it really the manufacturer's responsibility to make sure the architect understands it and also to check their design to make sure it matches the testing before selling the contractor the material? Perhaps ... perhaps not.
I'm drawing a lot of things together without knowing full details here, and don't forget this is all in the UK, but I've seen similar issues on projects I've worked on here in the States. Projects where people have been pretty lazy about understanding the conditions of passing code-required fire propagation testing and replicating those conditions in the contract documents. With a test report like I've seen and my understanding of those code requirements, I'm not sure I could sit on a witness stand and say it was the manufacturer's fault in those cases and the architect is blameless.
^ Is all of that due to neo-liberal economic ideas? Probably, but that's the system we're working under. Saying I don't agree with the system isn't going to work as a defense.
You'd also have no problem finding hundreds of Architects lining up to sit on the expert witness stand to condemn their peers.
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