By US standards, it's in my neck of the woods, I'm guessing about 100 miles East.
By UK standards, it's miles away in another country.
I'm fortunate in living in semi-rural Wales, but I do privately rent and always have done.
I have never lived in a property which I have considered safe.
In the last property I rented for myself and my daughter, I found a nail in the floor boards which had gone through a gas pipe. It had been there for so long, there had been a catalytic reaction between the nail and the pipe. We had lived with it for four years before I discovered it.
I thought the gaseous whiff which I kept smelling was from the boiler, which also turned out to be illegal, carbon monoxide fumes coming back into the property from a flue which didn't meet legal standards.
I suspect the only reason my daughter and I weren't blown to kingdom come along with our neighbours, is my propensity for leaving windows open in all weathers.
That was nearly twenty years ago and I still wake at the slightest wiff of smoke, whether that's a garden fire, a neighbour's log burner, or more recently a factory which burned down about 10 miles away.
Yesterday I started out of sleep at the smell of my daughter making toast when she came home from work. I have become a human smoke alarm, the type which goes off if you so much as burn a crumb.
I taught my granddaughter how to get out of the house in the event of a fire long before this Grenfell disaster.
If none of this sounds like regular behaviour, I'm pretty sure it's the new normal.
I guess you were right after all - this disaster is in my neck of the woods and so many others' as well.
I'm sure I read somewhere this morning that 19 bodies were being held at the mortuary, 9 of those having been formally identified.
If all the complete bodies have been recovered, that leaves 60 reported missing, incomplete bodies still in the building.
An amnesty has been declared on immigration status and survivors will not have their status investigated. Last week the commissioner of the Metropolitan police said he didn't care what reasons people may have for not coming forward with information about who was in the building at the time of the fire, he just wanted to establish how many people were safe and how many were missing.
Given the condition of the bodies and the difficulties faced with some residents having medical and dental records abroad, unreported bodies, or body parts will hamper the process of identification and returning loved ones to their families for burial.
Investigators have been watching footage sent in by members of the public and listening to 999 calls to the emergency services in a bid to establish the events at Grenfell Tower 10 days ago.
Some calls to the emergency services lasted up to an hour and have been described as harrowing.
The layers of those involved in and affected by the disaster are manifold beyond comprehension.
It has been confirmed that the fire at Grenfell was started by a faulty fridge freezer and was not deliberate.
It has also been reported that the insulation used in the building was even more flammable than the cladding. Police are considering manslaughter charges as further investigations indicate failures in adhering to building regulations.
The official death toll stands at 9, whilst 79 people are considered missing presumed dead. All the complete bodies have been recovered from the building.
The death toll is expected to rise amid speculation that it could take a year to complete the full recovery process.
The number of residential tower blocks with safety concerns about cladding has gone up to 25: 12 with the exact same cladding as was used at Grenfell and 13 with similar.
Premier Inn has very serious concerns about three of it's high rise hotels.
The figure has gone up to 11 tower blocks in Salford, London and Plymouth.
None of the tower blocks in Scotland have this type of cladding. Bring partly devolved, Scotland has some of it's own laws. The Scots are generally more people friendly and aware in the way they handle social issues as far as I can work out.
Given the high proportion of Muslim families and refugees placed at Grenfell, it could be much the same in these other money spinning, inner city death traps.
It may well make all the residents vulnerable to a Darren-Osborne-a-like turned arsonist.
Hopefully, Camden has lead the way by having the fire brigade patrol the corridors until the cladding is removed at least.
Nine tower blocks in Salford have been found to have similar cladding to Grenfell.
Residents have reported that they do not have sprinklers, they have never heard the fire alarms being tested, nor have they ever had a fire drill, or evacuation practice, one resident having lived there for 26 years.
One man said he was one of three disabled people living on the 20th floor.
The arms discovered and people arrested in the connection with the mosque will have come about through the mosque being under observation.
If the people arrested were part of a network, then it would no longer be a discreet base to work from.
That would imply that after the event it would have almost certainly reverted back to just being a mosque.
Even if there were still some connection, the chances of Osborne hurting anyone other than ordinary folk leaving after evening prayers is really rather small.
Also, we have a judicial system here where people are considered innocent until proven guilty. It's one of the things that we rub other cultures noses in when being superior. It's a bit tricky trying to claim the moral and intellectual high ground if you condone running over random people in the street because some other people used the building behind them for something bad at some other point in time.
The entire congregation being part of a terrorist network doesn't really fit in with the restraint demonstrated by the imam and other people who apprehended Osborne, along with the reported praise of that act by the police, either.
Your claims that Osborne harmed guilty people is based on logical fallacy, and in doing so, gross bigotry.
You're far from being a stupid man, Yubba, but you really do have some stupid moments.
Of the 600 tower blocks across the UK with some sort of cladding, three so far have been found to use the exact same materials which are thought to have escalated the fire at Grenfell.
The London Borough of Camden's council are in the process of removing similar cladding from five of it's tower blocks. They have stated the panels used were found to be different from those they had commissioned for the refurbishments. The fire brigade will be patrolling the corridors of the buildings until the cladding has been removed.
Screening of cladding on tower blocks across the UK continues and panels are being removed for testing.
No LJ, it's not okay to repeat the guff you hear on Fox news and not even know the meaning of the words, never mind the political machinations behind the media, nor the potential impact of your copious threads.
No Yubba, I did not mean that people having a different opinion from one's own when I used the phrase 'negative impact'.
People having different opinions can be very stimulating, particularly if they can argue their case well.
You saying you hate 'pakis' may have a negative impact, however. I appreciate you are angry about what happened to you and I appreciate you hate the person who did it to you. I get that when someone commits an atrocity, it's human nature to recoil from anyone who reminds you of that person, but the atrocity was not committed by all Pakistani people.
To fail to make this distinction and to discriminate on those grounds on a public forum is bigotry.
Bigotry has a negative impact.
I've already posted about forgiveness, whether that has a religious backdrop, or not. I believe forgiveness is about taking back something for yourself so a perpetrator no longer has the same power over you. If someone can do that, it is far from stupid. It's about taking your life back from someone who stole it.
I don't think of you as a 'bad' person, LJ. I don't think of people in those terms.
I do however think your threads have a negative impact in more than one way, which I realise is not your intention.
Most of us don't intend to have a negative impact, but inevitably at times we will.
It's important that we think about how we present our opinions, or information and monitor ourselves, finding ways to improve as we go along.
Use of language can be a way of doing that. If we say 'Muslims are terrorists', we include all those Muslims who aren't terrorists. That amounts to prejudice, discrimination and a pair bigotry.
Religious beliefs are somewhat irrelevant when it comes to terrorism. The salient feature of terrorism is harm done to other's, or murder.
Personally, I don't much like the word 'terrorist', either, and I have a number of reasons for that, but I'll save that for another time.
From what I understand of your posts, I disagree with your arguments and have said so.
I have tried to provide you with information to justify my arguments.
That's how debate works.
I don't understand your 'I know what you're up to' comment. Whatever you are thinking, it comes from your own internal value framework and is likely nothing to do with me.
On the subject of therapy, I would like to point out that the volunteers are likely working towards any number of professional qualifications, or accreditation which requires hundreds of hours practise.
Most people do this on a voluntary basis, as very few are lucky enough to have paid support.
This means that volunteers will likely be studying, working to support themselves (and their studies/professional supervision), volunteering their skills elsewhere, or all three, as well as volunteering their time to support those affected by the fire.
Personally, I don't think it's reasonable to criticise the service they are offering, particularly if you don't know how these services work in the UK.
I have already posted twice that the therapy centre has OFFERED it's services and INVITED people to use those services if they so WISH.
I have already posted that the service has been offered to all those affected by the disaster, not just survivors, therefore support needs will vary.
If you wish to block this kind of service on the grounds that it is too soon, services are no longer client lead where people can make their own decisions about the right time for them.
As the service has been set up by volunteers, it's unlikely that potential users will fret that the government won't offer them anything else if they don't use it because the government hasn't provided it in the first place.
It is possible however, that when the publicity and pressure dies down, the government won't trouble themselves to offer those affected anything more than the bog standard 6 sessions of CBT currently (not very) available on the NHS.
I would imagine it might have gone up since then, but they're holding off from daily press announcements until a final, or as near to final figure can be released.
This is the kind of place where kids can forget to put their bicycle away at the end of the day and it will still be there in the street in the morning.
My daughter was relieved that this man didn't live here, though. It reduces the chance that she will have served him in the shop.
She said, had she chatted to him, had friendly conversations as you do with customers, she would have felt guilty by association.
It has been reported that Darren Osborne's sister has made a statement to the press: she apologised.
online today!jac_the_gripper Forum Posts (5,363)
RE: Towering inferno in England
It depends on your perspective, Ooby.By US standards, it's in my neck of the woods, I'm guessing about 100 miles East.
By UK standards, it's miles away in another country.
I'm fortunate in living in semi-rural Wales, but I do privately rent and always have done.
I have never lived in a property which I have considered safe.
In the last property I rented for myself and my daughter, I found a nail in the floor boards which had gone through a gas pipe. It had been there for so long, there had been a catalytic reaction between the nail and the pipe. We had lived with it for four years before I discovered it.
I thought the gaseous whiff which I kept smelling was from the boiler, which also turned out to be illegal, carbon monoxide fumes coming back into the property from a flue which didn't meet legal standards.
I suspect the only reason my daughter and I weren't blown to kingdom come along with our neighbours, is my propensity for leaving windows open in all weathers.
That was nearly twenty years ago and I still wake at the slightest wiff of smoke, whether that's a garden fire, a neighbour's log burner, or more recently a factory which burned down about 10 miles away.
Yesterday I started out of sleep at the smell of my daughter making toast when she came home from work. I have become a human smoke alarm, the type which goes off if you so much as burn a crumb.
I taught my granddaughter how to get out of the house in the event of a fire long before this Grenfell disaster.
If none of this sounds like regular behaviour, I'm pretty sure it's the new normal.
I guess you were right after all - this disaster is in my neck of the woods and so many others' as well.