Flammable building panels a needle

A horrific fast-moving fire that claimed 72 lives last June in a London high-rise called Grenfell Tower sparked questions worldwide about the safety of skyscrapers.

How many other buildings are clad with the same flammable aluminum panels that doomed Grenfell Tower, and where are they?

Are there any here?

Not long after the London fire, the Democrat and Chronicle began looking into the aluminum cladding of one Rochester high-rise. In the fall, the newspaper expanded its inquiry through an open-records request to the city for information on the construction of nine prominent downtown buildings.

Those records weren't provided until last month — and they failed to explain the makeup of the building facades. Inquiries with building owners, architects, suppliers and construction managers also failed to yield definitive answers.

City building-department and fire officials say they believe all Rochester skyscrapers are safe, and they think no high-rises here have flammable panels — but they don't know for sure.

"The code is not black and white. It's not that easy to get answers at every turn," Rochester code enforcement manager Kurt Martin said when asked if any local buildings were clad in the suspect material.

"I can't really say."

One reason for the lack of clarity is that at some point, the city decided to discard archival documents that might have contained the answer.

A recently released assessment tool could provide some answers but so far, it hasn't been adopted by local authorities.

This surprising inability to identify buildings with flammable panels is not unique to Rochester. It's universal.

"You can't just look at them and say ‘Oh yeah, these are bad. It's impossible to do that. The only way you’d ever know is to literally take the panels off and have them tested," said Glenn Corbett, an associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

"This is an issue for us nationally. No one has come up with a cohesive, comprehensive plan as to how we’re going to deal with it," Corbett said.

In Rochester, like countless other cities, safety officials have pondered whether a similar fire could happen here.

"We have had multiple conversations since the fire in England," said Rochester Fire Deputy Chief Christine Schryver, who serves as the department's fire marshal. "Those type of situations always trigger concerns for us."

London fire: Worst high-rise blazes in history

Their conclusion? "To our knowledge, there are no buildings in the city of Rochester that have used that type of construction," she said.

But, Schryver acknowledged, officials can't be 100 percent sure.

After a months-long investigation, the Democrat and Chronicle identified two downtown high-rises that have aluminum facades. A portion of the Rochester Riverside Convention Center also is clad in aluminum.

But the newspaper was unable to determine whether the facades were the flammable kind. Schryver asserted those two buildings did not have flammable panels, but, when pressed, could provide no evidence that was the case.

The city has no records that show the materials used to construct those buildings or most of the 60 to 70 other structures in Rochester that qualify as high-rises*, the investigation found.

The records — if they ever did identify the materials — were classified as unneeded and thrown away years ago, Martin said.

The owner of one of the high rises in question did not know for certain what type of aluminum panel is on the exterior of their building. The owners of the other high rise did not respond to repeated calls for comment.

Though the city has owned the convention center since it was built in the 1980s, officials say they could not find records that showed whether its aluminum facade was flammable.

Exterior fires on big buildings don't start easily.

"These panels, you can't just ignite them, like somebody throws a cigarette out the window and it gets caught in one," Corbett said.

A hotter, more persistent source is needed. Fireworks have touched off several skyscraper exterior blazes overseas. Grills on high-rise balconies, overheated lights or electrical systems, fires in trash containers or cars near the base of buildings have started others.

The Grenfell Tower fire began with a malfunctioning apartment refrigerator.

Modern skyscrapers are built with firewalls and doors and other features meant to contain smoke and flames in the area where they originate.

Sprinkler systems, long required in new high rises, can extinguish small fires and suppress larger ones long enough for people to escape and firefighters to arrive.

But buildings with exterior facades that are made of flammable aluminum panels present a special problem. The concern is focused on high-rises like Grenfell, especially apartment buildings and hotels where people might be sleeping because they take so much longer to evacuate.

Once flames reach a panel assembly, they can ignite the insulation that often was placed next to the panel. Then the panel itself goes up, with its plastic core burning and melting.

The melting plastic can carry the fire to areas below. The burning panels can light off adjoining panels and those on the floor above.

"You’re literally putting a torch directly underneath the material above. It grows exponentially," Corbett said. "The thing runs up the entire face of the building."

Sprinkler systems and internal firestops can do nothing to check the spread up a building's facade.

"It will have burned the entire face of the building off before you can do anything," Corbett cautioned.

In some overseas fires, the flames have not penetrated to the interior and occupants have been able to evacuate without injury. The worst-case scenario, though, is that flames penetrate the building's structure walls on multiple floors at once, or that heat causes windows to implode and allow the fire entry.

In retrospect, London officials were forced to admit that Grenfell Tower was a fire trap. In addition to its flammable exterior panels, which had been installed in a recent renovation, the apartment building had no sprinklers, no building-wide fire alarms and only one stairway.

Rochester fire and building officials say they believe even if any local buildings had aluminum panels, modern high-rise construction techniques and sprinklers would prevent a runaway fire.

"Even if a fire started in one of our buildings, the unique circumstances that happened in London ... are not likely to happen here," said Rochester Fire Capt. Edward Kuppinger, who works in the fire marshal's office.

In Rochester, almost all the high-rise fires in recent decades have been in apartment buildings, caused by careless smokers or a pan left unattended on a kitchen stove. None have spread far through the building or resulted in multiple fatalities.

None of the three Rochester buildings identified by the Democrat and Chronicle as having some form of aluminum facade has suffered a fire since that cladding was put in place.

And while at least 30 high-rise fires involving flammable panels have been reported elsewhere in the United States, none has resulted in multiple fatalities.

But relying on the past to predict the future might not be the best approach, one expert said.

"That whole historical perspective thing, you have to be real, real careful with that," said Robert Solomon, building-protection division manager at the Massachusetts-based National Fire Protection Association.

"It's good we’ve had no problems, but you don't know what's going to happen this afternoon or next year or in five years," he said. "It would be almost negligent for a jurisdiction not to be taking a second look at this."

As fire-safety and municipal officials in the USA scrambled to respond after the London fire, they came to an unpleasant realization — they couldn't tell what kind of aluminum panels had been placed on a given building.

Some types of panels have fire-resistant cores. Others have cores that melt and burn. A visual inspection typically provides no clue which they are. They’re not labeled, Corbett said.

"Unless you’re physically there seeing them come out of the (shipping) container and go up on the building, it's impossible to tell," said Corbett, who previously worked in municipal code enforcement in Texas.

The only sure-way way to know the core's makeup is to subject a panel to a burn test, a costly and time-consuming undertaking.

Watch:How a burn test is done

Following the Grenfell fire, Solomon said, code officials from several dozen U.S. cities asked the NFPA to devise another way to identify buildings that might bear flammable panels. The result, unveiled about two weeks ago, is a risk-assessment tool that municipalities or building owners can download and use at no charge.

Users input what they know about a building's construction and use, possible fire ignition sources and other data. If the user isn't sure what the facade is made of, the tool will assume it has flammable panels.

EFFECT, as the system is called, spits out a measure of the risk the building might pose to the people who occupy it if its facade truly were flammable. Users can consider steps that might make the building safer — install new doors, upgrade fire alarms, remove exterior lighting — and then run the tool again to see how much they'd lower the risk rating.

"This tool provides a method for people to try to determine what they have," Solomon said.

Rochester officials have looked at the tool, which likely would require the expertise of a paid consultant to run. But because they are nearly certain no Rochester high-rises have flammable panels, they see no need to use EFFECT, Schryver said.

She and other officials also expressed concern about opening a can of worms.

"The problem is, what do we do with that information?" Martin said. "There's no law that would make them (owners) change it (a building's exterior cladding)."

When a new building is constructed, city officials say they are typically given a set of architectural drawings and a set of papers that itemizes the materials and furnishings used in the building.

City officials say they keep copies of drawings in digital form or on microfiche and send binders containing the building specifications to the city archive.

Though state guidelines say municipalities can discard such material after six years, Rochester officials say they will keep these materials indefinitely.

Older records that document the construction of nearly all of downtown's high-rises were kept on paper in a storage space for many years, preserved should someone need to reference them.

But not any longer. "At one point along the way, somebody got the bright idea to purge that stuff," code enforcement manager Kurt Martin said.

That explains why the D&C's open-records request to the city for construction-related documents for nine Rochester high-rises yielded a single box containing a haphazard collection of recently issued building permits, a few old blueprints and some yellowed letters from city residents.

The records included almost no information about methods of construction or the type of building materials used.

Corbett said this is not uncommon.

"It's an inconsistent thing across the country. There are cities where files are fine, and other places they don't have them," he said.

Building owners typically are given detailed drawings and a collection of written specifications. But over time, especially when a building changes hands, those materials often get lost.

"That stuff isn't being kept," Solomon said. "If everything's okay, it doesn't matter. But now, something bubbles up and everybody's scratching their heads saying they don't know what it is, they don't know if it's been tested."

Not long after the Grenfell Tower fire, local news media in several U.S. cities highlighted buildings clad with flammable panels.

A hotel in Baltimore, a condominium tower in Chicago, a football stadium in Cleveland — they were easy to find, because a manufacturer of polyethylene-core aluminum panels, Arconic Inc., had featured those projects on its website.

But those cities were exceptions. In most places, there was no hard-and-fast knowledge of which buildings might have been clad with the suspect panels.

Solomon, of the National Fire Protection Association, said he believes it is incumbent on municipalities to ferret out structures that pose an undue risk of an exterior fire.

"It's enough of a concern that the cities or the jurisdictions have an obligation to go out and make a more evidence-based, scientific assessment — a second look, or maybe a first look," he said.

Schryver, Rochester's deputy fire chief, said that while officials see no evidence that local buildings have flammable panels, they will continue to look into it. She plans to meet with the city building department to compare notes.

The two buildings they are most likely to discuss are the pair of high-rises identified by the Democrat and Chronicle. The facades of both structures have been described in news articles and other materials as including aluminum panels.

The Democrat and Chronicle is not naming the buildings at this time, both because of the lack of proof that there is cause for concern and to avoid unnecessary alarm.

City building officials said they did not know whether the panels were the flammable variety. Records reviewed through the newspaper's Freedom of Information Law request did not answer the question.

Queries to the buildings' architects, to a company that installed the cladding on one of the buildings and to a company that managed construction of the other building came to naught.

Schryver, the deputy chief, said that Chief John Schreiber was certain the panels on one of the buildings didn't have combustible plastic insulation. When asked how he knew this, she did not reply.

The third downtown structure identified as having aluminum cladding is the Rochester Riverside Convention Center, which opened in the mid-1980s. The structure, with a soaring atrium, large ballrooms and numerous smaller rooms, is the equivalent of four stories in height.

For that reason, city officials said the possible presence of flammable panels there may be of less significance. "The convention center isn't technically a high-rise, so the concerns are different," Schryver said.

She said at least part of the building was protected by sprinklers.

Still, multiple city departments looked for records that describe the building's aluminum facade and did not find any. The New York City architectural firm that designed it did not respond to a reporter's inquiry.

The flammable panels came on the marketplace in the 1970s and were used on an unknown number of U.S. skyscrapers. Most building codes in this country, including those in use in New York and Rochester, placed few or no limits on the use of such material.

The code adopted by New York state in 2003 forbade the use of exterior composite panels above the fourth or fifth floor of a building unless they've passed a burn test that measured their resistance to fire. That height is well within reach of fire hoses.The code was amended in 2012 to allow panels that haven't passed a burn test to be used farther up on a high-rise in some circumstances.

Building codes overseas have been more lax when it comes to aluminum composite panels, and many skyscrapers have featured them from top to bottom.

Dubai and other cities in the United Arab Emirates, where there has been a massive boom in high-rise construction, have hundreds of buildings clad in flammable panels. Those cities have witnessed a remarkable string of exterior fires.

In response, the government has ordered the flammable panels removed from many Dubai high rises. After the London fire, officials in other countries such as England, Germany and Australia also directed that high-risk panels be replaced in some cases.

There have been no public reports of panels being taken off high-rises in the United States.

In Chicago, officials verified that a 58-story condominium is faced with flammable panels but initially determined it was safe because it had an array of fire-safety features, said Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the city Department of Buildings.

City officials will review an engineer's report that was commissioned by the owner, he said, and are continuing to consult with national and international experts on the risk of flammable cladding.

In Baltimore, the owners of a 32-story hotel did a fire-safety analysis that showed the structure met all applicable codes, said Tania Baker, spokeswoman for the city housing agency. City officials concur with that analysis, she said.

Generally, the presence of such facades is viewed as less of a threat in the United States than overseas. There has never been a multi-fatality here in which flammable panels were implicated, and there have been no high-profile exterior fires in recent years.

Corbett, the fire-safety professor, said municipal officials and building owners should not take too much solace from that circumstance.

"We haven't had any major multi-death fires in one of these things yet. But it's a roulette wheel," Corbett said. "It most definitely could happen in the United States. Like any fire, it's a series of events. If they line up properly, you get what you get."

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*U.S. building codes generally classify structures 75 feet or taller as high-rise buildings. That height is roughly equivalent to eight stories, though the feet-per-story ratio can vary. The tallest building in Rochester, the 443-foot Xerox Tower, has 30 stories. At least 15 local buildings rise 200 feet or more.