Urban fires

Grenfell Tower in London* was destroyed in the early hours of 14 th June 2017 by a conflagration that started as a small domestic fire in a refrigerator in an apartment kitchen on the fourth floor of the building. Seventy-two people died on the night and many more required medical treatments. The building was destroyed throughout. Questions about why and how this tragedy could occur with a well-developed London fire-fighting infrastructure, and professional capability, prompted the UK-government to set up a public investigation to find the causes and make recommendations so that such a disaster cannot happen again. The Grenfell Tower public inquiry was sanctioned by the Prime Minister, starting on 1 st April 2018. The inquiry objective at the outset was to find the reason(s) for a domestic apartment fire spreading, after firefighters arrived, to an inferno engulfing almost the whole building in 20 minutes. Such was the scale and breadth of the inquiry, that it called for 1100 statements, took seven years to deliver a final report, and cost the UK government over £200 million, mainly in lawyers' fees and expert-witness expenses. An interim report published on 30 th October 2019, resting on expert witness advice, blames the rapid spread of fire on the polymer insulation in the aluminium cladding. The 2-volume, 1700-page, final report was published on 4 th July 2024, with no new scientific explanation. Culpability is distributed amongst a plethora of manufacturers and suppliers and anonymous government personnel. Yet, there is a growing literature by thermodynamics and reaction kinetics research professionals, none of whom were called upon as 'expert' witnesses, that have raised queries in scientific literature, and indeed, also with the Inquiry. This prima facie scientific evidence has been dismissed or overlooked by the Inquiry team. The scientific reason for the rapid conflagration was the application of water to extinguish an aluminium fire. Water is the catalyst for both the initiation and propagation of highly exothermic oxidation reactions of aluminium: water reacts ferociously with molten aluminium and can be explosive. There is no reference to this essential scientific explanation of the Grenfell disaster in the final Grenfell Inquiry report. Curiously, neither is there any reference to this knowledge on Wikipedia* "Grenfell Fire "article with 350 references. Why, we ask?

The Jakarta City (DKJ) area which is prone to fire is in the high category, where the biggest factor causing electrical short circuits is 90 percent. The research objective is to describe the fire disaster mitigation efforts carried out by the DKJ Fire and Rescue Service (Gulkarmat). The research uses qualitative descriptive methods. Key informant, Head of the DKJ Gulkarmat Service. Currently, a snowball search is being carried out for informants, namely the Head of the Fire Prevention Division of Gulkarmat DKJ. Data collection techniques include interviews, observations, and documentation studies with interactive model data analysis techniques. The research results show that fire disaster mitigation efforts carried out by the DKJ Fire and Rescue Service (Gulkarmat) have been carried out well, but need to be improved. Education and outreach is needed to the DKJ community regarding fire mitigation, with a massive outreach design and required education, outreach, supervision and evaluation.

espanolLa pandemia de COVID-19 hizo peligroso algo tan simple como respirar. Asi se masifico una nueva arquitectura portatil - la mascarilla - que protege al cuerpo de un entorno hostil. Sin embargo, como propone este texto, esas arquitecturas ya habian aparecido en la region indopacifica, ya sea como proteccion ante el humo de incendios los gases toxicos con que se reprimieron las protestas. EnglishThe COVID-19 pandemic made dangerous something as simple as breathing. Thus, a new portable architecture - the mask -, which protects the body from a hostile environment, became widespread. This text, however, proposes that these architectures had already appeared in the Indo-Pacific region, either as protection against the smoke from fires or the toxic gases used in riot control or mass demonstrations.

The paper describes the results of investigation into urban fires in the city of Vilnius, Lithuania in the three-year period of 2010–2012. Cartographic and geospatial analysis of fires is needed due to dynamism of this phenomenon, risks for inhabitants, importance to city's socio-economic development and lack of geographic approach to research of urban fires in Lithuania. The registered fires were mapped and grouped by their type (abandoned building fires, open space fires, fires in tower blocks of flats, garbage can fires, vehicle fires and arsons), cause, location type (open space and premises) and by fatality rate. Spatial distribution of fires at different scales was analysed using cartographic method and spatial analysis with GIS. Some unexpected patterns have been revealed, analysed and compared with building materials that dominate in different areas of the city. It was found out that relative frequency of fires depends on complex parameters of socio-demographic environme...

Humans have ambiguous relationships with fire. The ability to control fire has been part of shaping human development and human society as well as the characteristics of Australian ecosystems, but bushfire is also a threat to all forms of life. The chemical process of combustion is also complicit in the Anthropocene and climate change, which threatens life as we know it. The current Australian curriculum generally ignores fire, and this needs reconfiguring. In this chapter we disrupt the traditional curriculum and argue for becoming-with fire as a pyro-pedagogy for teaching and learning with this unruly kin.

The article studies how a sudden disaster, the Great Fire of Turku in 1827, affected the life trajectory of a Finnish merchant, Henric Lindberg, who suffered great economic losses in the fire. Despite his attempts to provide for and rehouse his large family, Lindberg, who lost his creditworthiness in the eyes of his former trading partners, was finally forced in 1830 to petition the sovereign for financial help in his distress. Lindberg's petition was highly unusual as primarily the poorest elements of society petitioned for loans or donations for personal purposes - merchants (i.e., members of the bourgeoisie engaged in urban trade), rarely approached the highest decision-makers with such requests. As such, Lindberg's petition provides an example of the deep trust the subjects had in the sovereign's benevolence and, indeed, in the whole petitioning institution. The case exemplifies how diverse and heterogeneous the merchants actually were in the largest city in Finland in the early nineteenth century, and how differently the merchants reacted and recovered in the case of a major disaster. The study provides insights into the underlying mechanisms of the estate society and demonstrates that not even in a hierarchical society was poverty necessarily transmitted to the following generation, but there were indeed opportunities for upward social mobility.

The aim of this article is to explain divergent rules on the partition of inheritance that determined the production of probate documents, as they came to be defined by legislators in the two Nordic realms in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Danish and Norwegian law codes of 1683–1687 stipulated that an inventory of property was only required when the heirs were minors, absent, or not the direct descendants of the deceased, whereas the Swedish Law Code of 1734 allowed for no exceptions and ordered that all inventories be held by the local courts. It did not require an officially attested deed of partition, which had been made obligatory in the Danish and Norwegian codes, valid also in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. An estimate of documentation from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Nordic archives is presented in the latter part of the article, and indicates that probate records concerning almost a million individuals are preserved, the great majority from the last decades of that period.