My neighbor Chris was doing some online digging into the London hotel fire:

As far as I can tell from poking around online, the cladding on Grenfell Tower is in general a composite of a core material (for stiffness?) sandwiched in aluminum. While aluminum itself isn’t going to catch fire, it will of course conduct heat like the dickens. The manufacturers’ product specs I look at offer non-fire-rated (polyethylene a/k/a PE a/k/a resin) and fire-rated (not sure the material) cores. I’m gonna guess Grenfell’s owners didn’t spring for the fire-rated type.

He went on to point out that the hotel that burned in Dubai last year also used the non-fire-rated cladding in the outside panels. It too went up like a torch. As would most of the towers in Dubai, all made of same material. Depending on how many of today’s skyscrapers were built to the same low standard to save on construction material costs, there could be more fires just like this to come.

And one more grim point. Basically, every one of these buildings can be weaponized simply by starting a fire in the right place. Instant Towering Inferno. No need to fly a jetliner into a building or park a truck full of nitrates next to one. Just the right incendiary device and bam, you have annihilated a whole vertical community. They believe it was an overheated refrigerator motor that began yesterday’s conflagration. It could be something as insignificant as a tossed cigarette next time. It’s hard to imagine terrorists or saboteurs not taking advantage of this. Builders buy this non-fire retardant polyethylene wholesale from numerous manufacturers. There’s definitely a very competitive market for it and building codes can be very lax, even it turns out, in the middle of London. The city forgot the incendiaries that set it ablaze in the Blitz.  One wonders where else they’ve forgotten, or just didn’t give a damn. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of towers around the globe wrapped in the stuff, hidden beneath shiny aluminum exteriors that reflect the sky and the clouds and the setting sun.

Grenfell Tower