Holy Smoke!
The new heating system in Norwich Catholic Cathedral is causing people to dial 999 because they see a fire, according to reports on the BBC.
The Shambles of the Regional Fire Control Centres
NuLabor wanted to bring in a set of nine reginal control centres for the fire services across the country to replace 46 control rooms. That was the theory, but read this article in The Daily Telegraph, which details the shambles. The buildings are ready, but the software is not, so they are just standing idle and costing about £1.5 million a month.
I was alerted to this by an article on the BBC local news about the unused centre at Waterbeach. The new government is now saying that councils can opt out of the new centres. In a way, that is compounding the problem.
Surely, one of the main reasons for having a network of identical centres, is that this woulds mean that if say an operator had to move say to another part of the country, they could then be reemployed if necessary at another centre without retraining. I once met a doctor, whose wife was an ambulance controller. When he had moved to Cambridge, she had taken a year to be retrained because all the systems were different. That is rediculous, as we need standard systems for fire, police and ambulance all over the UK. I have heard reliable reports of Chief Constables, who want the best system money can buy, as long as no other force has it.
It should be one size that fits all! As an aside here, when we designed Artemis, there was essentially one system, that could manage projects ofd all sizes. You just specified it with bigger discs and more terminals for larger projects. But then we knew how to design systems properly so they worked. When I see the words government and computer system, because of my bad eyesight, I always read it as a gravy train to disaster.
So these fire control centres should be got up and running as soon as possible and if they are late then the contractors should be liable for the losses. I suspect though, that that is impossible, as the idiot who specified the system and wrote the contract forgot to put in a penalty clause. He or she should be fired! But they won’t be!
Tower Block Safety
Years ago, we lived in one of the tower blocks in the Barbican. At the time, they were some of the highest residential blocks in Europe and you can still see Cromwell, Lauderdale and Shakespeare Towers looming behind the City of London like three cricket stumps.
I am always nervous of fire, and we wouldn’t have moved in with our young family, if we weren’t satisfied that the blocks were safe.
- All of the balconies on the blocks connected up, so in an emergency, you could go all the way round the block to get away from the fire.
- Each balcony had two escape staircases, that connected to the lobbies below your floor.
- There was of course a protected stairwell to get down in an emergency.
It am not aware that there has not been a serious fire in any of these blocks, so other precautions must have worked as well.
So it would appear that well-designed tower blocks can work. And talking to my children now, they all enjoyed the time spent living above the city.
But.
We have just had the tragedy in Camberwell. Was that block built to the same standards as the Barbican?
The Anonymous Widower 