A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdiction. It is used as a residential, office building, or other functions including hotel, retail, or with multiple purposes combined. Residential high-rise buildings are also known in some varieties of English, such as British English, as tower blocks and may be referred to as MDUs, standing for multi-dwelling units. A very tall high-rise building is referred to as a skyscraper.
A blast injury is a complex type of physical trauma resulting from direct or indirect exposure to an explosion. Blast injuries occur with the detonation of high-order explosives as well as the deflagration of low order explosives. These injuries are compounded when the explosion occurs in a confined space.
A blast shelter is a place where people can go to protect themselves from blasts and explosions, like those from bombs, or in hazardous worksites, such as on oil and gas refineries or petrochemical facilities. It differs from a fallout shelter, in that its main purpose is to protect from shock waves and overpressure instead of from radioactive precipitation, as a fallout shelter does. It is also possible for a shelter to protect from both blasts and fallout.
A gas explosion is the ignition of a mixture of air and flammable gas, typically from a gas leak. In household accidents, the principal explosive gases are those used for heating or cooking purposes such as natural gas, methane, propane, butane. In industrial explosions many other gases, like hydrogen, as well as evaporated (gaseous) gasoline or ethanol play an important role. Industrial gas explosions can be prevented with the use of intrinsic safety barriers to prevent ignition, or use of alternative energy.
Broadwater Farm, often referred to simply as "The Farm", is an area in Tottenham, North London, straddling the River Moselle. The eastern half of the area is dominated by the Broadwater Farm Estate ("BWFE"), an experiment in high-density social housing, loosely based on Corbusian ideas, dominated by concrete towers connected by walkways, built in the late 1960s using cheap but fire-vulnerable pre-fabricated concrete panels. The western half of the area is taken up by Lordship Recreation Ground, one of north London's largest parks. Broadwater Farm in 2011 had a population of 4,844. The estate is owned by Haringey London Borough Council.
Building regulations in the United Kingdom are statutory instruments or statutory regulations that seek to ensure that the policies set out in the relevant legislation are carried out. Building regulations approval is required for most building work in the UK.
The Red Road Flats were a mid-twentieth-century high-rise housing complex located between the districts of Balornock and Barmulloch in the northeast of the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The estate originally consisted of eight multi-storey blocks of steel frame construction. All were demolished by 2015. Two were "slabs", much wider in cross-section than they are deep. Six were "points", more of a traditional tower block shape. The slabs had 28 floors, the point blocks 31, and taken together, they were designed for a population of 4,700 people. The point blocks were among the tallest buildings in Glasgow at 89 metres (292 ft), second in overall height behind the former Bluevale and Whitevale Towers in Camlachie. The 30th floor of the point blocks were the highest inhabitable floor level of any building in Glasgow.
The Lakanal House fire occurred in a tower block on 3 July 2009 in Camberwell, London. Six people were killed, and at least 20 injured, when a high-rise fire, caused by a faulty television set, developed and spread through a number of flats in the twelve-storey building.
On June 29, 1995, the Sampoong Department Store in Seoul, South Korea, collapsed due to a structural failure. The collapse killed 502 people and injured 937, making it the largest peacetime disaster in South Korean history. It was the deadliest non-deliberate modern building collapse until the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh.
Structural integrity and failure is an aspect of engineering that deals with the ability of a structure to support a designed structural load without breaking and includes the study of past structural failures in order to prevent failures in future designs.
Robustness is the ability of a structure to withstand events like fire, explosions, impact or the consequences of human error, without being damaged to an extent disproportionate to the original cause – as defined in EN 1991-1-7 of the Accidental Actions Eurocode.
On 14 June 2017, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London, England, at 00:54 BST and burned for 60 hours. Seventy people died at the scene and two people died later in hospital, with more than 70 injured and 223 escaping. It was the deadliest structural fire in the United Kingdom since the 1988 Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster and the worst UK residential fire since the Blitz of World War II.
Grenfell Tower is a derelict 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington in London, England. The tower was completed in 1974 as part of the first phase of the Lancaster West Estate. Most of the tower was destroyed in a severe fire on 14 June 2017.
Samuel Webb was a British architect who was famous for his work on the structural and fire safety of Tower Blocks following his investigation into the Ronan Point tower block.
Tower blocks are high-rise buildings for residential use. These blocks began to be built in Great Britain after the Second World War. The first residential tower block, "The Lawn", was constructed in Harlow, Essex, in 1951; it is now a Grade II listed building. In many cases, tower blocks were seen as a "quick-fix" to cure problems caused by the existence of crumbling and unsanitary 19th-century dwellings or to replace buildings destroyed by German aerial bombing. It was argued that towers surrounded by public open space could provide for the same population density as the terraced housing and small private gardens they replaced, offering larger rooms and improved views, whilst being cheaper to build.
The Harrow Court fire occurred in a tower block on 2 February 2005 in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England. Three people were killed, two of them firefighters, when a fire developed and spread from the 14th floor. An investigation of the fire found that there was an Abnormal Rapid Fire Development, caused by a candle melting the surface of a television, which then spread rapidly up the outside of the building to subsequent floors.
The Ledbury Estate is a large estate of social housing, in Peckham in the London Borough of Southwark. The estate is just south of the Old Kent Road, part of the A2 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) from both Tower Bridge and the Elephant & Castle it is adjacent to land used by George Livesey for the South London Gasworks.
On 31 December 2018, at approximately 6:02 a.m. local time, an apartment block in Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, partially collapsed. The collapse killed 39 people and injured 17 more. The cause of the collapse is believed to have been a gas explosion.
The United Kingdom cladding crisis, also known as the cladding scandal, is an ongoing social crisis that followed the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 and the Bolton Cube fire of 15 November 2019. The fires revealed that large numbers of buildings had been clad in dangerously combustible materials, comprising a combination of flammable cladding and/or flammable insulation.
Barton House is a residential tower block in the Barton Hill area of Bristol, England. It is the city's oldest tower block and was officially opened on 23 July 1958.
