A deadly tower block blaze in Spain has focused attention on notorious flammable building materials—but around the world, there's little momentum to stop using them.
The inferno quickly drew comparisons to London’s Grenfell Tower fire, which killed 72 people in 2017. While what drove the blaze in Valencia is unclear, attention immediately turned to the building’s cladding—material added to the outside of high-rise blocks to improve insulation and aesthetics, and which helped the Grenfell fire spread so quickly. Until 2019, Spain, like many nations, permitted flammable materials to be included in cladding on new high-rises.
Douglas Hope, a Las Vegas-based fire protection engineer, says the problem is global—one of the deadliest facade blazes was a 28-story high-rise apartment block in Shanghai in 2010 that had polyurethane foam insulation. “Ten years before Grenfell, these sorts of fires began to pop up all over the world.” The likes of Germany and the US have much more stringent regulations—the flammable cladding used in Grenfell was already banned in both countries.
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