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Comment by Malkut | Hacker News Reader

I used to work under this bridge. Everybody knew that the bridge was unsafe. However, the local government didn't want to close the bridge because it was critical for the community. Some activists didn't want to close it because they didn't want to build a replacement. So disasters happen, shit always happens. But this was not a disaster, something unknown, this is manslaughter from my point of view. I wish somebody pays for it, but this won't happen.

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Almost the same thing happened in London a year ago, local government was too afraid to make any action and improve the situation. No one is gonna to pay for it, unless it's you with taxes.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/grenfell-tow...

Until I saw the link you posted, I thought you were talking about Hammersmith Flyover, which had to be closed for several weeks to strengthen it after they found an alarming number of cracks.

They still don't have a long-term plan to replace it afaik, despite the strengthening works only being a temporary measure.

> temporary measure

Everyone knows that temporary is a new word for permanent.

//TODO: temporary workaround, fix ASAP, etc.

The difference between this and grenfell was that here the local authorities had been acknowledged of the status of the bridge via official documents. The bridge suffer a major redesign in the '90s. I cannot believe how nobody cared about it.

Sorry but I really don't understand how this applies to Grenfell. It's not like there were any major maintenance issues with the tower that were ignored by the council and ended up causing it to fall down. The problem was that some new cladding was installed which didn't follow safety regulations and thus compromised the (in principle adequate) fire safety provisions, and that turned a small flat fire into a disaster.

What he means is that also in the case of the Grenfell towers "everybody knew it was going to happen". Except it's not true (as I bet it's not true in case of the Genoa bridge as well), as among the thousands of angry complaints that the residents sent to the council in the years before the catastrophe, apparently none was about the choice of the cladding.

Firemen all over Europe had warned loudly about that type of cladding. In Germany, it is illegal to use it in multi-floored buildings exactly because of that reason.

There are probably many more aspects which led to the Greenfell disaster. The building having a sprinkler system would have prevented it. The firemen having an appropriately high ladder rtuck or aerial work platform would have made it almost comfortable to salvage the trapped 80 people. Some waited many hours before they borned to death. The firemen in London, Kensington didn't had a high ladder. Because of cost.

Grenfell isn't the same, a considerable amount of money had been spent renovating the building.

Grenfell's quite different to this. More similar is the Hammersmith Flyover where they recently had an issue with a post tensioned 60s structure, and corroded tendons snapping. In that case drastic action was taken, closing the structure (even though it carried arterial roads) and instigating a programme to replace the tendons gradually.

A common issue with many of the 1960s reinforced concrete structures is the difficulty of inspecting key structural members (e.g. encased tendons which may have also been the case with the Genoese bridge), lower standards than current (so the distance to reinforcement is less and corrosion is more likely) and maintenance regimes with lowered funding to repair an increasing number of deficient structures.

> Everybody knew that the bridge was unsafe.

Oh yes? So I suppose everybody also knows why it collapsed, right?

The thing is, saying that something is wrong is not a proof of anything: the signal to noise ratio is also important. Every time something happens, everybody knew it was going to happen: the problem is, this is true also for all the things that eventually didn't happen. It's very tempting, after the fact, to say "ah, we all knew it". It's also, mostly, a delusion

Known unknowns etcetera :)

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