Grenfell’s aftermath beggars belief
LONDON— It sticks up into the sky like a charcoal-blackened finger, a husk of a building with blank eyes where every single window was blown out.
Twenty-four storeys tall, with a single stairwell escape route, where those who defied fire department orders to “stay put” picked their way over victims who’d collapsed on the steps as they fled.
Youngest victim of the June 14 conflagration — worst London fire in more than a century — appears to be a baby not yet born, delivered to a mother in an induced coma, the seven-month fetus already dead in the womb from poisonous fumes.
Yet almost three weeks after the blaze that consumed Grenfell Tower, part of the Lancaster West Estate — public housing for poor people — the exact number of casualties, at least 80 lives lost, is not yet known and may never be known. It defies comprehension, in an age of digitalized information saturation, that such basic facts seem beyond the reach of officials, most especially the Kensington and Chelsea council that managed the property with such colossal dereliction of duty.
In the absence of any official list of casualties, frustrated next of kin are turning to volunteer demographers and independent data analysts who’ve pored over floor plans and spreadsheets, colour-coding apartment units according to confirmed dead, presumed dead, still unaccounted for and known survivors.
Tacked and taped to nearby commercial buildings, pubs, the closest tube station and makeshift memorial mounds are photographs and biographical details and heartwrenching entreaties about loved ones — though the postings have already turned yellow, fraying, and doubtless the fate of many in this gallery of the missing has since been determined. The ones who aren’t in the hospital are in the morgue, if no human remains are left in the tower, still too dangerous to fully explore.
Jessica, 12 years old, missing. Nura, Hashim, Yawya, Firdaws and Yaqub, missing. Yasim El-Nahabi, missing.
The names say a great deal about who lived in this fire trap in a region of London — not far from trendy Notting Hill, but a universe removed — where Arabic is the second-most common language spoken, where immigrants and migrants have lived warehoused lives in social housing that activists have long decried as unsafe and ripe for disaster. “UNFORGIVEABLE,” declares one poster. “JUSTICE FOR GRENFELL,” demands another. And, “GRENFELL IS EVERYBODY.”
Which indeed has become the manifesto for the thousands who reside in estates just like this one across London, across Britain, where 149 such buildings failed safety tests conducted after the block fire. An emergency evacuation of hundreds from a similar 23-floor tower estate in Camden last week was deemed necessary upon the discovery that fire doors were not working, a problem that residents had been complaining about for five years, the Guardian reported. Tenants of 650 units are scrambling for temporary shelter.
A public inquiry is to be held into the tragedy — more accurately, as some have angrily pointed out, the atrocity — of Grenfell. Fire, as an element fuelled by oxygen, is essentially a wild thing, difficult to tame. It behaves as it pleases when there is no safety hazard containment. Grenfell had no sprinkler system — only 100 older tower blocks in Britain have been retrofitted with sprinklers since 2013; about 4,000 still have not — and the blaze quickly raged out of control, even with fire brigades on scene within six minutes. But these were the same fire professionals who told residents to stay in place when alarmed tenants began calling in about spreading flames.
So many questions that demand answers, perhaps most pertinently why the council cut budget corners — they had the money — in a multimillion-dollar refurbishment completed a year ago that saw cladding placed on the outside of Grenfell, apparently as little more than an esthetic sheath for an eyesore tower constructed in the 1970s, and which may not have been up to building code standards.
Better fire-retardant cladding, the Telegraph has reported, which cost about $5 more per square metre, was rejected by the spendthrift council. The cut-rate cladding, banned for high buildings in many countries, is believed responsible for the fire feeding upon itself so ferociously. Zinc-cladding, with a “fireresistant polyethylene core,” had been approved by the building’s tenant association but was swapped out for cheaper aluminum cladding that has since proved combustible in government tests.
Since the catastrophe, the government has been “urgently” conducting safety checks on an estimated 600 highrise buildings in England that have exterior cladding panels similar to those at Grenfell, while critics accuse officials of being complicit in no less than criminal negligence.
On Friday, the Tory leader of Kensington and Chelsea council announced he was stepping down, along with his deputy, amid a wave of fierce criticism over the agency’s response, both chaotic and sluggish, to the Grenfell fire. That included, in a tone-deaf decision of staggering proportions, their bungled attempt to exclude journalists from a meeting (they’re usually public) to discuss the disaster, that decision overturned by a high court after being challenged by media organizations.
The government of Prime Minister Theresa May had warned it might step in and directly appoint commissioners if the council didn’t sharply improve its performance and conduct itself more respectfully with fire survivors.
In an unprecedented meeting at Downing St. on Friday, May listened to the passionate outpouring of rage and grief from a group of Grenfell residents, community leaders and volunteers exasperated by the slow pace of alternate housing arrangements, casualty confirmation and a general sense that their up-closeand-personal tragedies are being ignored while bureaucrats make detached decisions.
That came simultaneous with media revealing that some of those left homeless by the fire have continued to be charged rent on their flats from direct payment accounts, if you can believe it.
Sadly nothing beggars belief anymore, arising from a disaster that has claimed far more lives than any of the terrorist assaults and bombings committed in Britain over the past dozen years.
But these are poor people, marginalized communities, frequently dismissed as nuisances when they complain about their living conditions rather than profess gratitude.
And, unlike random terrorist strikes, Grenfell fires don’t happen to just anybody.