‘No-one should have lived inside Grenfell’
THE “horrendous” spread of the fire around and inside Grenfell Tower meant nobody should ever have been allowed to live in the high-rise, a senior fire commander told an inquiry into the incident.
Deputy assistant commissioner Andrew O’Loughlin said fire crews could never have predicted the way that flames engulfed the outside of the cladded block and tore through its internal compartments.
He said people who were in flats that had not yet been reached by smoke or fire should have been protected by staying where they were until escape routes were made safe.
Mr O’Loughlin was in overall charge at the incident as the most senior London Fire Brigade (LFB) officer present when the advice to “stay put” was changed.
From around 2.47am, residents were encouraged to escape if they could, rather than await rescue.
Asked whether he felt this should have happened sooner, the incident commander replied: “I think the ‘stay put’ advice for the conditions we were dealing with... ‘stay put’ should have stayed, people should have been safe in their flats. You wouldn’t expect fire to spread around the building like it did on the outside, and for it to fail so catastrophically, we’d never expected or anticipated that would do that in the way it did, and then similarly... we would not expect the internal protection to fail so badly as well.
“So my expectation was people who were safe in their flats should stay safe in their flats.”
Counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett pressed: “On what you later discovered during the course of the night, do you accept that the revocation of the ‘stay put’ advice should have happened at an earlier stage than it did?”
He answered: “I don’t think you could say that a decision could be taken earlier based on what I saw several hours later.
“I mean, the building was so horrendous several hours later that I think no-one should have lived in the building, so to say we should have changed the ‘stay put’ advice, I don’t think would have been reasonable based on something that happened several hours later that none of us could ever have expected.”
Some 25 minutes passed before Mr O’Loughlin was informed of the change, the inquiry heard.
He also received no updates from those in charge of the fire sector and the unit coordinating fire survival guidance calls from trapped residents during this time.
Mr O’Loughlin told the inquiry he was “confused” by the change in policy and did not think it would necessarily make a material difference to the rescue plan.
He said that communicating this change to residents was “not easily done” as there was no mechanism for contacting every individual flat in the north Kensington high-rise.
But he also said he didn’t expect it to make much difference to people who were trapped inside their flats as they already could not leave.
Some 71 people died in the June 14 fire, with a 72nd resident dying months later.
The inquiry is currently in its first phase hearing evidence from firefighters.