Fire brigade’s stay-put advice proved wrong in 21 minutes

FIRE safety advice to ‘ stay put’ in Grenfell proved to be tragically redundant within just half an hour of the fire breaking out, a damning report found yesterday.

Residents were told to stay in their flats by the London Fire Brigade – even as flames spread to the top of the 24- storey building in just 12 minutes.

Fire safety expert Dr Barbara Lane said the advice was already questionable within 21 minutes of the first 999 call at 12.54am.

By 1.26am the advice was utterly redundant as the inferno raged out of control.

Despite this, the policy was not formally abandoned until 2.47am - almost two hours after the fire started in the kitchen of Flat 16 on the fourth floor.

By this stage corridors and staircases on the upper floors were ‘boiling hot’ and the ‘immediate physical pain and toxicity of smoke’ prevented escape.

The report, released by the inquiry yesterday, raises troubling questions about the response of the London Fire Brigade on June 14 last year.

The Mail has revealed that the advice is still in place at all the nearby high-rise towers.

Dr Lane said that the fire service was aware that the blaze had spread to the outside of the tower at 1.13am and watched as it rapidly engulfed the building. However, firefighters in the tower ‘were still advising residents to stay in their flats or in another flat on that floor’, she wrote.

Dr Lane found that conditions on the stairs and the corridors were largely free from smoke for the first 35 minutes and ‘therefore tenable for escape’.

She concluded that residents should never have been told to stay in their flats because of the block’s structural flaws.

The ‘stay put’ advice had ‘effectively failed’ by 1.26am, around 32 minutes after the first 999 call. Then at 2.06am, the fire brigade upgraded the disaster to a ‘major incident’ – but continued to tell residents to stay in their homes for a further 41 minutes.

The LFB then changed its policy to a full evacuation – although it is not known how they got this message to those stuck in the building, the report said. It also remains unclear why there was such a gap between the advice being rendered redundant and the fire service changing tack.

‘The ultimate consequence was a disproportionally high loss of life,’ Dr Lane wrote.

‘This was a kitchen fire escalating to an almost all-building fire, compromising the fundamental basis of the stay put strategy. I am particularly concerned by the delay from 2.06am, when a major incident was declared, to 2.47am.’

The long-accepted advice for tower block residents was stay put if there was a blaze because experts believed that fires in individual flats can usually be contained. But the flammable cladding on the outside of Grenfell allowed the fire to spread quickly from flat to flat. Dr Lane found there was no evidence that the LFB knew of the combustible nature of the cladding.

She recommended that blocks of flats have an automatic or manual means of sounding an evacuation alarm. There also needs to be ‘serious and urgent’ consideration to changing the approach in buildings covered with combustible materials.

Another expert, Professor Jose Torero, said that during the early stage of the fire evacuation was not free from risk but ‘can be considered a better strategy than “stay put”.’ But some 70 minutes after the start of the blaze firefighters were ‘ outside the bounds of conventional practice’, his report said.

Richard Millett, QC to the inquiry, said about 187 occupants had evacuated by the time the ‘stay put’ advice was formally abandoned at 2.47am.

Matt Wrack of the Fire Brigades Union said it was clear firemen faced an ‘unprecedented catastrophe’ and ‘did their utmost on the night to save as many lives as they could.’

‘Immediate physical pain’