UK: Gene Murtagh, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Kingspan Group, has called for a number of changes to be made to fire safety regulations for buildings in the UK. He called for large-scale testing under BS8414 to be extended to cover all cladding systems, a strengthening of the way desktop studies are used in fire safety compliance, improved training for installers of building facades and better control of fire safety through the design and construction process of buildings. His comments were made to Building Magazine following the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 and at the start of the Public Inquiry into the incident.
“So far as I am aware, polyethylene (PE) cored Aluminium Composite Materials (ACM) have never been successfully tested in a cladding system in a manner consistent with building regulations so it is hard to understand how this product ever ended up on Grenfell Tower,” said Murtagh. “Similarly, given the fire performance characteristics of these ACM cladding panels, it is no surprise in my view that they performed so poorly in combination with a range of insulation types in the recent series of large-scale tests by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).” said Murtagh added that fire safety is an ‘extremely complex’ field and that any investigation needs to consider a wide range of factors.
The majority of the insulation purchased for use in a refurbishment of Grenfell Tower prior to the fire was Celotex’s RS5000 polyisocyanurate foam (PIR) insulation board. However, Kingspan confirmed in July 2017 that a small amount of its Kooltherm K15 phenolic insulation product had also been used without its knowledge and that it had no involvement in the design or specification of the refurbishment.
