The fire in the London tower block is an unmitigated disaster. No sprinkler system and no external fire escape.
How did it ever pass inspection?

I'm sure other similar buildings will now get a thorough review.

Judging by comments above it would seem council planning departments think 'looks' are more important than safety. An external fire escape would not look nice

I repeat we live in a crazy world.

Unless you were trying to escape from a burning building............

There are no external fire escapes on any of our tower blocks here in cov...maybe it is something to do with people trying to kill themselves?? My mates flat was torched, he was 4th floor and was trapped on the balcony...his only option?? Chuck himself off!!! He did live and luckily recovered well. The 3stories round here, top deck has a hatch in the floor of the balcony and a ladder is screwed to the flat belows balcony wall...you open the hatch and climb down onto your neighbours balcony

Forgive the subject matter but scroll down to the tower block photo....that is one of our smaller towers ...the city centre ones are higher...you will see no external fire escape
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...cigarette.html
On looking it up, it would appear that the housing association here have used aluminium cladding....thank goodness!!

Hello all,
Very hot here today, got home from work & Tony had mowned the front lawn, & trimmed the bush back. It's a blurdy triffid!!
Lauryn took Rosie out early this morning, before it got to hot.
It's awful about the tower block, it's really upset me to think about all those people loosing everything & family loosing their lives in such a awful way
It's terrifying to think that there's no sprinklers etc, that safety is such a short cut

Can't bear to watch it on the news, unbelievable that in this country, and in the 21st century, lives have been lost in such a terrible way.

Yes tragic story and yes there are no external fire escapes on that building.

Have they stopped fitting them to tower blocks because of the danger of suicides

15 years ago I was reading a book about the 1930's financial crash. There were a lot of stories about people jumping from windows on Wall Street. (Actualy never happened)

The author wrote that national suicide rates hardly ever vary year on year regardless of whether we are at war, in a huge financial crisis, living next to a nuclear disaster (e.g. Chernobel) etc.

People commit suicide for all sorts of reasons and they will do so whether a tower block has an external escape ladder or not.

It's a bit like the 3 packets of paracetamol thing, is there any evidence that the overall suicide rate has gone down because of it I don't think so.