You have much more trust in UK authorities than I think they warrant. It is said regulations are written in blood; that means the regulations that preceded present regulations are the result of past experts being wrong. What are the chances that we are fortunate enough to live in a time when regulations are truly optimal and won't need to be changed in the future? Pretty low, I'd think. What are the odds that present regulations have been influenced and compromised by commercial interests? 100% guarantee, just look at the clusterfuck of an inquiry. If the government can't reclad a few hundred towers, do you think they'd dare condemn thousands of towers? They're addressing the cladding because it's feasible to fix, but retrofitting buildings with more stairwells? That's way more expensive, so it's being ignored.

There will be more fires, more deaths, and more changes to regulations. What experts say should be considered, but not treated as dogma. At best they are less wrong than their predecessors but more wrong than their future successors. If the people in that tower had disregarded the advice of extant UK experts, they would have gotten out alive. If that building had been constructed with more stairwells than UK experts presently say is required, they could have gotten out alive. If there had been an operational building wide alarm, as are found in American buildings, those people would have gotten out alive. There is a whole lot wrong with extant regulations in the UK, and commercial interests have politicians and the public ignoring most of it to focus on the cladding fraud (those responsible should be in prison for life, but the cladding fraud is not the only problem this fire revealed.)

> Looking at the hard numbers, pushing evacuations might actually make things worse.

This is not a crowded nightclub we're talking about; rapid evacuation of residential highrises is a reality in America. Please go look at the hard numbers of Grenfell, particularly the timeline of conditions inside the tower. There was ample time to evacuate the tower several times over. In modern America, most of the residents would have been waiting on the sidewalk before the firemen even got there. The building wide fire alarm would have been blasting their eardrums out.