Fire chiefs defend telling Grenfell victims: Stay put
Bosses claim cladding was key factor in tower deaths
‘Warning was eerily prophetic’
FIRE chiefs defended their controversial ‘stay-put’ advice yesterday, claiming it would have saved lives before flammable cladding was installed at Grenfell Tower.
The London Fire Brigade said the Grenfell Tower Inquiry should consider whether immediate evacuation was feasible given the tower had only one staircase, no fire alarm and no system for giving an evacuation alert.
The speed and spread of the fire posed an ‘unprecedented set of challenges’ never seen by modern firefighters, it said.
The 700 firefighters tackling the blaze were likely to have faced ‘difficult choices’ about whether to advise residents to stay in their flats with ‘relatively clean air’ or urge them to escape via ‘hazardous and toxic’ conditions, the brigade added.
On the night of the inferno, terrified residents were instructed to stay in their flats by the London Fire Brigade (LFB) 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 it was 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 a statement to the inquiry, the LFB said: ‘There are numerous examples... of rapidly changing conditions within the building, by which smoke, toxicity and visibility radically changed... sometimes in seconds. Advice to residents... involve assessments of risk which are not straightforward.’
It said advising whether to stay or go involved ‘substantial risk either way’.
Stay-put advice was suitable for Grenfell Tower when it was originally built in the Seventies because a fire would have been contained in one flat.
But flammable cladding added to the building during a refurbishment in 2016 allowed the fire to spread at an alarming rate.
The LFB added: ‘What is less clear is the extent to which maintenance programmes and refurbishments have undermined the integrity of the original design and construction principles from a fire safety perspective.’
However, critics say the delay in switching to an evacuation plan could have cost lives.
Last month, the LFB suspended the stay-put policy for buildings with flammable cladding.
Lawyers for the bereaved told the inquiry that advice given to residents by 999 operators was ‘confusing, dangerous and too often fatal’. Even firefighters themselves ‘emphatically queried the logic of maintaining the stayput advice’ for almost two hours after the start of the blaze. The decision to maintain the policy was criticised in some of 250 statements taken from crews.
Survivor Marcio Gomes said delays in getting his family to safety cost the life of his unborn child. Danny Friedman QC, repre- senting almost 300 survivors and relatives, said: ‘This was not a fire to tell people to stay put in.
‘The response failed to realise quickly enough that this was a fire that could not be fought and required an evacuation that could not be delayed.’
He said the LFB then sent too many firemen and equipment inside the tower’s narrow stairwell – the only escape route – meaning it became impassable.
Mr Friedman said firefighters’ statements revealed a lack of experience or training for a fire of such magnitude and significant communication problems that amounted to ‘systemic failure’. Mr Gomes said in a statement that his wife Andreia was seven months pregnant when the family was trapped on the 21st floor.
Their baby’s heart stopped and he was stillborn that night.
He added: ‘I have nothing but praise for the firefighters who rushed into that tower and risked their lives to save people like us.
‘However, those in charge are a different issue for me. Someone was clearly telling fire brigade operators to tell us firefighters were coming to rescue us. The delay in telling us to evacuate nearly killed us and did kill my baby son. I have no doubt of that.’
Kensington and Chelsea council, which owned the tower, was warned by London Fire Brigade two months before the inferno that the new cladding might not meet building regulations.
But Mr Friedman said the council did not change its fire safety policy or ‘recognise any risk posed by cladding’.
The LFB issued the warning to all London councils about the risks of external cladding following a fire at a high-rise in 2016.
The LFB urged them to review the use of cladding and ‘take action to mitigate the fire risk’.
Mr Friedman said: ‘That warning stands as eerily prophetic, but appears to have gone unheeded.’