WITH regard to the Echo front page item on Sterte Court and the cladding issue (Aug 30), to quote a House of Commons Committee in 2000: “We do not believe that it should take a serious cladding fire in which many people are killed before all reasonable steps are taken towards minimising the risks.”

A lengthy multi-page priority report to government in 2000 yet seventeen years later Grenfell, wrapped in highly flammable thermoplastic cladding and insulation, exploded in flames.

All that was warned against in Parliament seventeen years earlier.

Grenfell Towers a building with one stairwell, no sprinkler systems, multi reports of electrical supply surges, with in the case of fire a stay put policy.

Seventy two terrified people died. Hundreds more residents and firefighters traumatised.

This should never have happened in any country but as we learnt such cladding fires only too common around the world with, as we also learnt, large numbers of high rises in our country wrapped in flammable cladding.And that including Sterte Court in Poole.

With a maritime background what then struck me personally so forcefully was the parallels between ships and high rises.

No major ship or rig afloat does not have sprinklers and inert gas fire smothering systems, multi escape routes, and first rate fire-fighting systems, all that Grenfell and so many high rises do not have.

Taking up then Sterte cladding flammability issue with Poole Council in 2017 I was repeatedly fobbed off.

It was then three years later in 2020 newly formed BCP announced the cladding would be replaced.

But then with references to “substandard work” and “defects”, not that the cladding was flammable.

In the end the residents in Sterte as so many in high rises, private and public, are the victims of the world-wide cladding industry.

Government support for tenants has been feeble.

Dreadful for Sterte residents in five years this work still not completed. Work that cladding manufacturers worldwide should be paying for.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Jubilee Road, Poole