Yet another astonishing revelation has emerged about the awful Grenfell Tower events this morning appears to lie in information shown on a company website but now deleted – presumably since news of the blaze hit the media.
Witt UK, a major manufacturer of industrial-scale fans and extraction systems, had a case-study on its website about its work on Grenfell Tower. That information shows that the building’s owners paid Witt to install an automatic alarm linked to the ventilation system during the 2016 refurbishment of the building.
An attempt to open the page now simply returns a ‘not found’ result:
However, the WayBackMachine web archive still has the page and shows the details of the case-study:
To be absolutely clear, the SKWAWKBOX is not saying that either the information in this case study, nor its removal, in any way incriminate Witt. Manufacturers of fans and ventilation are not manufacturers of general fire alarms and attribution of responsibility will be the job of the inquiry that is expected to take place.
However, the page does appear to have been removed – and the archived version gives details of the functioning of the fire-alarm system:
The system is designed, as it should be, to isolate the central stairwell (the case study confirms there was only one, as the floor-plan indicates) from smoke in the event of a blaze.
However, residents who escaped the building insist that there was no audible fire alarm to alert residents. In fact, many attribute their escape to the alertness of Muslim residents, who were awake for their night-time Ramadan prayers when the blaze started:
If these reports are accurate, then a building in which a considerable amount of money was spent on an automated system to trigger vents to close did not have an audible alarm to alert the human beings in the building.
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