Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
To the list of things seemingly on the verge of going up in flames—parched forests; LeBron James's second go-round in Cleveland; the American Experiment—add Cleveland's FirstEnergy Stadium.According to an Associated Press report, the home of the NFL's Browns may have been built using the same shimmering exterior aluminum panels that were used in Grenfell Tower, a London apartment building that caught fire last month in an incident that killed at least 80 people.The specific panels, known as "cladding," are made of a composite material called Reynobond PE and are used to improve energy efficiency and make buildings, well, shinier. Because they are also combustible, they are not recommended for use in buildings above 40 feet.British authorities are investigating whether the panels helped spread the fire that engulfed the outer walls of the 24-story, 220-foot-high residential tower, a blaze that affected most floors of the building, destroyed 151 homes, and took 40 fire engines and more than 200 firefighters to put out.According to the AP, the American company that produces the panels, Arconic Inc., has announced that it will no longer make them available for high-rise buildings. However, the company's promotional brochures claim that FirstEnergy stadium—along with an Alaskan high school and a Baltimore luxury hotel—were constructed with the same cladding.More specifically, Arconic's website states that the Browns' stadium features 100,000 square feet of the material across its exterior.Sports stadium fires are not unheard of. A 1985 fire at the home stadium of English soccer club Bradford City that began when a stray cigarette butt ignited a pile of trash under antiquated wooden bleachers killed 56 people and led to a nationwide ban of new wooden grandstands. Eight years later, a fire in the empty press box at Fulton County Stadium didn't cause any injuries, but did delay an Atlanta Braves-St. Louis Cardinals game by two hours.In March, a large fire damaged a soccer stadium in Shanghai. No injuries were reported.The good-ish news? The AP reports that FirstEnergy Stadium may not be wrapped in the exact same material as Grenfell Tower:
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Determining which buildings might be wrapped in the material in the United States is difficult. City inspectors and building owners might not even know. In some cases, building records have been long discarded and neither the owners, operators, contractors nor architects involved could or would confirm whether the cladding was used.
A spokesman for the mayor of Cleveland would not say if the stadium was built with the cladding. Instead, he said all questions "will need to wait until after the investigators finish their report on the fire in London."The AP reports that no one has declared the U.S. buildings unsafe, and that the federal government has not initiated any of the widespread testing of aluminum paneling that British authorities ordered after the London blaze. However, fire safety experts and engineers told the AP that the panels should be tested and that "anybody who is inside of these buildings has a right to know" if they present an actual fire hazard.According to a 2015 research report on the flammability of exterior walls cited by the AP, the potential danger posed by building materials such as the Reynobond PE panels is that "the whole outside of your building could be on fire, yet the internal sprinkler heads may never activate!"That makes it virtually impossible to know whether the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront hotel or Cleveland Browns' football stadium — both identified by Arconic's brochures as wrapped in Reynobond PE — are actually clad in the same material as Grenfell Tower, which was engulfed in flames in less than five minutes.