Environmental contamination following the Grenfell Tower fire

Stec, Anna A.; Dickens, Kathryn; Barnes, Jessica; Bedford, Clare

doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2019.03.153

Cited by 34 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Stec's team found significantly high levels of a number of toxicants, including evidence of polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxin concentrations '60 times greater than UK urban reference soil levels', benzene levels '40 times greater', and levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons 'approximately 160 times greater'. 51 The published report recommended further analysis around the tower 'to understand possible health risks'. 52 The soil around the tower was highly toxic and presented (and continues to present) various potential health risks to its remaining residents.…”

Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

Choksey

2021

Med Humanities

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This article considers processes of environmental racialisation in the postgenomic era through their politics of difference and poetics of influence. Subfields like epigenetics promise to account for a plurality of possible influences on health outcomes. While this appears to present possibilities for historical reparation to communities whose epigenomes may have been chronically altered by histories of violence and trauma, the prevailing trend has been to compound processes of racialisation in the reproduction of good/bad environments. The postgenomic era has promised an epistemological transformation of ideas and values of human life, but its practices, technologies and ideology have so far prevented this. Epigenetics, rather, reproduces biomedical exclusions through imaginaries of embodied contexts, methods of occlusion and hypervisibility, and assignations of delay and deviance. This is more complex than both genetic reductionism and environmental racism: studies on epigenetics reveal a poetics of influence at work under liberal humanism complicit in the creation of death-worlds for racialised populations. Other experiments with life are possible and unfolding: Jay Bernard’s poem ‘Chemical’, set in the aftermath of London’s Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, unmoors its bodies from material environment, offering a spectral configuration of collective life. This configuration involves negotiating with the fixing of time and space on which genomic imaginaries depend.

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Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…51 The published report recommended further analysis around the tower 'to understand possible health risks'. 52 The soil around the tower was highly toxic and presented (and continues to present) various potential health risks to its remaining residents.…”

Section: Original Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

Choksey

2021

Med Humanities

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“…However, we do know that asbestos was present in the building – denied by Public Health England for almost a year after the fire, and thus denying any health screening to possibly affected local residents – while hydrogen cyanide was emitted from the burning insulation and will be a cause of long‐term detrimental health effects for an unknowable number of survivors (see, more generally, Stec et al . 2019).…”

Section: Grenfell As a Site Of State‐corporate Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Home as a Site of State‐Corporate Violence: Grenfell Tower, Aetiologies and Aftermaths

Tombs

2020

Howard J Crime Justice

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Focusing on the aftermaths and consequences of the Grenfell Tower fire, this article reveals the factors which combined to produce a fire that could have such devastating effects. Further, it delineates the discrete ways in which distinct types of harms -physical, emotional and psychological, cultural and relational, and financial and economic -continue to be produced by a combination of State and corporate acts and omissions. Some of these harms are readily apparent, others are opaque and obscured. It concludes by showing how failures to mitigate these factors constitute one manifestation of the more general phenomenon of 'social murder'.While research, writing and activism around the phenomena of corporate and State crime have burgeoned since they first reached mainstream academic attention in the 1960s, such crimes remain relatively obscured by the crimes of the usual suspects. This is despite the fact that corporate and State crimes and harms kill, injure, defraud, and poison many, many more people than so-called conventional crimes; moreover, they often do so relatively silently, with their role and mutual complicity rarely becoming apparent and, if attaining visibility, are rarely brought within the purview of crime, let alone violent crime (Tombs and Whyte 2015). Finally, if curiously, they are rarely exposed in relation to 'the home'.Here I cast a critical lens on a recent atrocity -the fire at Grenfell Tower in West London -and examine how we might focus on this as an instance of State-corporate violence. In indicating the ways in which a combination of State and corporate acts and omissions resulted in a fire producing a range of social harms, I bring to the fore how 'home' can be the site of State-corporate criminality and harm.The article begins by setting out some of the key parameters of corporate crime, then State-corporate crime, before indicating why, and how, many of these are best understood as crimes of violence. The main sections of 120 C

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“…These two factors affect the amount and duration of environmental exposure and help predict which organisms are most likely to be affected [138]. For this purpose, it is of extreme importance that reports of environmental contamination following major fire disasters are prepared [20,[139][140][141]. Such data are usually not collected due to a combination of factors: emergency services are too busy dealing with the fire to monitor the emissions, they lack necessary training to monitor emissions or to understand the impacts of firefighting on the environment.…”

Section: Ecotoxicity Tests On the Nearby Environment Contaminated Bymentioning

confidence: 99%

Review: The Use of Bench-Scale Tests to Determine Toxic Organic Compounds in Fire Effluents and to Subsequently Estimate Their Impact on the Environment

et al. 2020

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Generated fire effluents are toxic and responsible for the majority of fire deaths and injuries. Therefore, measures of fire safety and the assessment of toxic effects of fires on humans, which are the key factors to assess fire hazards, have been researched in the last decades. However, it is more and more recognized that there is also a need to assess the environmental impact of toxic compounds within fire effluents. Since ecotoxicology investigates the toxic effects of fire effluents on populations, interactions between ecology and toxicology are very important. These interactions may be complex and may involve research of food chains with several different trophic levels. This makes tracing of toxicants, to obtain reliable results, a real challenge. To tackle it, the bench-scale test is a cheaper and less complex method than large-scale fire simulations. Progress in the field of ecotoxicological studies is important because long-term exposure from the environment and bioaccumulation of toxic compounds in the human food chain may cause indirect health effects on humans. It is also an important tool for the general protection of the environment and biodiversity. Last, with data obtained from these studies, databases for the Life Cycle Assessment of construction materials can be improved.

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Environmental contamination following the Grenfell Tower fire

Cited by 34 publications

References 18 publications

Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

Environmental racialisation and poetics of influence in the postgenomic era: fire, soil, spirit

Home as a Site of State‐Corporate Violence: Grenfell Tower, Aetiologies and Aftermaths

Review: The Use of Bench-Scale Tests to Determine Toxic Organic Compounds in Fire Effluents and to Subsequently Estimate Their Impact on the Environment

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