Secretive but Not On Her Majesty's Service

Yesterday I was home alone and had Victor Meldrew type adventures answering the phone to all the people who ring the landline when I am usually at work.

One was the man who threatens to have one arrested on behalf of HMRC for non payment of taxes.  I played along for a bit and gave him a false date of birth and National Secuirty number to see how far the thing would go.  Eventually he asked me to write down a string of reference numbers at which point I got bored and asked him how he lived with himself .... at which point he started shouting "motherfucker" a lot and slammed the phone down.  I would have recorded it but I believe Paul Chowdhry has beaten me to it ...



...and this man ... who apart form being a somewhat inept satirist seems to be talking to exactly the same person I was ....



I mean seriously the police really can't do anything about this....?  It makes them look like idiots that these scams continue unabated...

Grenfell, Mogg and the Titanic

Jacob Rees-Mogg got in trouble the other day for saying something along the lines that the victims of Grenfell were silly for following the official advice and staying put.  Well, there's a lot of dead air to fill on LBC and only a limited number of right wing people to fill it...

Rather a tactless/nasty thing to say and yet one does feel that his selfish brain had a point somewhere...  Maybe you have to be incredibly selfish to point out the elephant in the room but "stay put in the building that's burning" doesn't sound on the face of it like sensible advice ...with the benefit of hindsight.

I followed some discussions on line about whether the LFB advice made any sense.  I was advised it was standard advice to stop people running into the flames / dying of smoke inhallation.  But is this the truth?

The official report helpfully contains in the executive summary the following timeline...

01.26 MPS declares a Major Incident. 
01.27 Fire reaches the roof and starts to spread horizontally. 
01.29 WM Michael Dowden, the LFB incident commander, makes pumps 20 (having made up from 4 to 6, to 8, to 10 and to 15 between 
01.13 and 01.28). 
01.30 First 999 call reporting fire penetrating a flat (Mariem Elgwahry, Flat 196, floor 22). 
01.31 WM Dowden makes pumps 25. By this time 110 out of 297 occupants have escaped; the fire starts to spread to the north elevation of the tower. 
01.42 The LAS declares a Significant Incident. 
01.45 First NPAS (police) helicopter arrives at the scene. 
01.50 WM Dowden hands over incident command to SM Andrew Walton. By this time 168 of 297 occupants had escaped. 
01.58 SM Walton hands over incident command to DAC Andrew O’Loughlin. 
02.00 Flames travel across the north and east elevations of the tower, and start to spread around the crown and diagonally across the face of the building, affecting flats in the south-east and north-west corners. 
02.04 GM Richard Welch declares himself incident commander, not knowing that DAC O’Loughlin has already assumed command. GM Welch makes pumps 40. 
02.06 GM Welch declares a Major Incident. 02.11 DAC O’Loughlin takes handover from GM Welch. 02.15 SOM Joanne Smith arrives at the control room. 
02.17 Bridgehead moves from floor 2 up to floor 3. 
02.20 Flames start to spread to south elevation. 
02.26 The LAS declares a Major Incident 
02.35 Control room decides to revoke the “stay put” advice and tell all occupants calling 999 to leave the tower. 

When the 2:35 advice was put out then what was the situation with the smoke and fire in stairwells?

The executive summary continues...

The spread of fire and smoke within the tower is described in Chapter 25. Many lobbies had started to fill with smoke by around 01.20 and some were significantly smoke-logged by 01.40. 

By 02.00 a significant number were heavily smoke-logged. Until around 01.50 there was less smoke in the stairs; by then 168 people had been able to escape. 

After that time the stairs started to fill with smoke, particularly at lower levels. At some levels the smoke was thick and the heat considerable. By 02.20 the smoke in the stairs did pose a risk to life, but the stairs were not absolutely impassable to all even after that time. 

So clearly the advice given was just wrong and people could easilly have got out if they'd have been told to leave earlier.  Even Rees-Mogg like a broken clock is right sometimes and he has point ... the official advice to stay put makes no sense.  Several people made the point that there were many cases of the fire brigade turning up to flat fires to find the whole flat burnt out but that the fire had not spread to the rest of the building ... and inferred from this that staying put can in many cases be safer than leaving.  However, it's a basic law of physics that heat rises and therefore if you're above a fire you're never going to be as safe as being below it (even if the fire is contained).

So where does this advice come from if it doesn't match with basic physics / common sense?  Whenever I've worked in a tall building and there's a fire alarm they evacuate everyone immediately.  So why is it different for residential properties?  The answer is stairwells are not made to support a mass evacuation...  A plan right up there with not having enough lifeboats on the Titanic because it was deemed unsinkable.  Indeed I use the word stairwellS ... there was only one.

Watch manager Mr O'Keeffe said: "I didn't have an opinion, other than if people started to evacuate it would become multiple casualties in the stairs and that we would have great difficulty in finding out where people were.  But if people start evacuating - when the entire building is on fire or most of it is on fire and the only way down is impossible - that will have been a huge catastrophe."

So in a sense Mr Ress-Mogg was right ...if it had been me I would have been straight out of there because the stay put advice was clearly designed to save lives - not to save my individual life.  Like the officers on the Titanic the LFB were effectively trying to reduce panic and/or decide who would and wouldn't be saved and trying to find ways of putting off the inevitable...?

Of course in this case the fire had reached the top of the building by 1:30 moving round the outside due to the flamable cladding and breaching its way in through windows and kitchen extractor outlets.  So why did it take till 2pm to start evacuating people...?

A possible further explanation is available in Chapter 25 which explains how the spread of smoke was not equal so that although the stairs remained passable some lobbies were clearly not:

"The speed at which smoke penetrated particular lobbies varied. The smoke that billowed from the north lift when it reached the ground floor at 01.26 is broadly indicative of the volume of smoke in the lobby on floor 10 when it stopped there during its descent. Smoke is likely to have begun to penetrate floor 10 after 01.20 when the external flame front reached that floor. By 01.22 the external flame front had reached the top of floor 11. The rapid accumulation of smoke in the lobby on floor 10 was sufficient to trap three people (Mohamednur Tuccu, Khadija Khalloufi and Ali Yawar Jafari) in that lobby. "

Not that I've had time to read all 800 pages of the phase 1 report - it's incredibly detailed on everything from the cladding to the UPVC windows even showing up pictures of who sat where in the control rooms...

...however, every page one reads simply reinforces the reality that ...well... it was built on the cheap, wasn't it?  From the report of the fire to fire engulfing the building took little over an hour. Even if better use had been made of this critical time window there would still have been many deaths...?

There was a Prime Minister Johnson

There was a Prime Minister Johnson
Who sacked his own backbenchers and then
Couldn't pass legislation
Or unite the nation
So why not elect him again then?

It's started...

So it starts officially.  My first election leaflet for 2019.  This one from Sarah Jones defending her majority of 5642.  Red scarf.  Cloth cap.  No one can accuse Labour these days of not looking Labour.  A solitary christmas borble attempts to cheer us up into turning out at the polls yet again...

 

...one is tempted to say one only turns out every 5 years and it's up to the politicans to fit into my schedule... except that one knows that the right wing never have a probem getting their vote out.  So I suppose I'll have to force myself.  Sarah promises to stand up for Croydon, campaign for safer streets and fight against cuts and a hard Brexit...

 

 

...on the back is the usual depressing it's a two horse race message familar to all those living in marginal constituencies.  Fortunately the Lib Dems hardly poll anything here so vote splitting isn't a problem but it is always somehow depressing to be told that really it's just a binary choice.   Funny I'd usually have a deluge of paper nonsense by now but I guess they've all run out of money with 3 elections in 5 years... or perhaps it all goes on social media advertising these days.

Everybody's dead, Dave!

I was at home with a cold the other day when I decided to escape Brexit by wandering over to Netflix where I watched the first episode of Red Dwarf again – “The End” - which I haven't seen for 20 odd years... 

Watching it from such a distance since its original broadcast (1998?) one has to take one’s hat off once again at just how brave this is as a piece of writing.  Starting with a sequence where Lister and Rimmer are arguing about doing their job the episode introduces us to a whole array of characters…   

... Captain Hollister, Kristine Kochanski, Todhunter, Petersen, Chen, Selby and George McIntyre and then promptly kills all of them simultaneously 15 minutes in.  They're all dead.

Now it’s necessary for us to know that all the crew are dead … but is it really necessary for us to see it?  A lot of this could be done in reported speech or gradually using flashbacks but instead… we’re introduced to a whole cast only for them to be expunged.  To be fair some re-appear later in flashbacks, as holograms or in time travel story lines (and in series VIII) … but it still seems brave. 

Of course it’s a bit like Alien in that respect – introduce “main” characters only to kill them - and that may be a reference here but … I don’t think this had been done before in a sitcom.  It’s one thing having a premise where the crew of a giant ship are all dead but it’s another thing to actually show them all, introduce us to them all and then kill them all (admittedly off screen).   I’ve said that before, haven’t I?  One other thing that did dawn on me watching this episode again - unlike Alien all the disasters that befall the crew of Red Dwarf are man made.  All of them.  Everybody's dead, Dave.

In many ways the early episodes of Red Dwarf remind me of the early episodes of Only Fools and Horses - 3 inadequate souls thrown together by the death/disappearance of the person/people who previously gave their lives safety and structure (Del’s parents / Captain Hollister and the officers).

Following the disaster (and 3 million years) Holly decides that the best person for Dave to spend the rest of his life alone with is not the late George McIntyre (the original ship’s hologram) but Arnold Rimmer (the original ship’s other vending machine repair man)…   Although one wonders if Rimmer didn’t just think up an incredibly devious self-serving argument as to why he’s more important to the ship’s mission than George and then somehow take advantage of Holly’s senility.  He's dead, Dave. Everybody is dead.

Wikipedia informs us that “Grant and Naylor were so embarrassed by the first series that they had requested that the BBC not repeat the episodes as they felt that it would harm the following series” but that of the first series this was the most popular episode.  Perhaps if they’d written it some years later they wouldn’t have taken this approach.  Series 3 doesn’t even bother to explain what happened following the end of series 2 except in fast scrolling text – perhaps because the writers realised with experience that what matters is the situation … not explaining why the situation is.  Not that it matters because here it works… Everyone. Everybody's dead, Dave!

There were lots of things I didn’t remember.  I didn’t remember the scutters being so prominent but this appears to be because they have been retroactively CGIed into some scenes.  I didn’t remember George McIntyre’s wake – such a clever way of introducing the audience to the concept of a hologram before Rimmer’s death and resurrection.  And I’d forgotten how good Rimmer and Lister were as mirrors of each other.  He's dead, Dave.

Lister’s ambitions to go and live on an island submerged by global warming and raise animals with officer Kristine Kochanski are as unrealistic as Rimmer’s ambitions to raise himself up from vending machine repair man to captain via sheer hard work.  Both are escaping into fantasy and both sets of fantasies are unachievable in different ways…  The cat meanwhile has no ambitions beyond the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs (with the possible exception of mate acquisition which is unattainable) and represents contentment.  I did remember the crew being reduced to piles of white powder and I did remember Holly providing the memorable exposition…

He's dead, Dave. Everybody is dead. Everybody is dead, Dave.