You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Alternative cladding tests to be carried out by experts
The UK’s national fire safety organisation is to carry out its own tests on cladding systems as the government’s latest round of tests draws to an end.
Because of a lack of confidence in the tests carried out by the government, the Fire Protection Association (FPA) will be carrying out similar – but more rigorous – tests on cladding systems.
One crucial difference will be that the FPA will add windows and other fixings to the walls – features that would be in place on an ordinary wall, but were absent from the government testing.
The FPA believes this is necessary because holes needed for screws and nails can cause fire safety issues, and the materials used to make windows can assist a fire to spread or enter the inside of a building.
READ MORE
Jonathan O’Neill, managing director of the FPA, told Inside Housing: “We’re not desperately comfortable with the tests. They’re perfect-build and they’ve got no penetrations in them. We don’t know how the fire stopping is going to work if you’ve got classic window melting for example. We don’t know whether that will expose the core insulation, and if it does, how that will react when subject to fire.
“We just want to make sure that the tests are as realistic as they possibly can be, because [in] the catastrophic failure that we saw at Grenfell, for example, the cladding has reacted very differently than it has with other fires that we’ve seen around the world. It looks as though the insulation contributed to the fire spread.”
Experts have also criticised the conditions of the government’s tests, which are being conducted at wind speeds of less than two metres per second.
This is half as fast as the UK average, and even slower than typical wind speeds at high altitude, such as the top of Grenfell Tower.
Even the tests of cladding systems that spread fire to the top of the building very quickly suggested that fire barriers prevented the fire from spreading horizontally, but experts have suggested that the higher wind speeds would have overcome these barriers.
Ronnie King, secretary of the All-Party Parliamentary Fire Safety & Rescue Group, told Inside Housing: “Wind very much increases the ferocity of the fire and at height it would change its direction as well. It could actually come in a downward direction or opposing directions. It could blow into the building.”
Arnold Tarling, a fire safety expert and chartered surveyor at Hindwoods, said: “If you have a wind blowing a flame sideways on the outside of a building, it will jump over the vertical barriers. It’s incredibly daft to say that inside of a warehouse it didn’t spread. Where was the wind equivalent at 13 storeys?”
A Department for Communities and Local Government spokesperson said: “The government’s large-scale fire testing programme was robust and endorsed by a range of experts across the sector. The results provide valuable evidence for landlords to help them make informed decisions about the safety of their buildings. We will be issuing consolidated detailed advice on all the tests shortly.”
The FPA is an independent body which promotes fire safety within industry and public life.
