What’s Going On:
In the wee hours of June 14, 2017, a catastrophic fire broke out in the Grenfell Tower–a high-rise residential building home to about 350 people–in West London. What initially started as a simple malfunction of a resident’s refrigerator quickly compounded into one of the deadliest structural disasters in the United Kingdom. 72 of the tower’s occupants perished in the blaze, and 151 of its homes were totally destroyed. The UK government immediately began investigating the fire, and tried to piece together how such a travesty happened. In October of last year, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry released the first phase of its report, examining the factors leading and contributing to the fire. Among other things, the building’s design and construction played a role in the rapid spread of the fire.
In any building, safety is of the utmost importance, and designers, engineers, and contractors must put an extra degree of forethought into that aspect of a project– especially when constructing a super tall building. With this in mind, BuiltWorlds recently sat down with Mehdi Jalayerian and Eric Lee of ESD, two experts when it comes to safety in supertall…