Grenfell fire chief: I wouldn’t change a thing
Firefighters had not trained for inferno as it was seen as being as unlikely as ‘space shuttle landing at Shard’
The head of the London Fire Brigade told the Grenfell Tower inquiry yesterday she would not change anything about the response to the blaze. Commissioner Dany Cotton likened the disaster to “a space shuttle landing in front of the Shard”, as she felt it was so unlikely such a fire could occur.
THE head of the London Fire Brigade has told the Grenfell Tower inquiry that she “would not change anything” the service did on the night of the disaster.
Commissioner Dany Cotton said the blaze had been considered as unlikely as “a space shuttle landing in front of the Shard”, so no special training had been developed for such an event.
Questioned on the potential failings of the LFB, including the decision to order residents to stay in their flats for more than an hour after it was clear the tower was in total grip of the flames, she said she had learnt no lessons from the night that would have enabled the policy to be reversed sooner.
Asked what she would do if she could go back to June 14 last year and change one thing, she said: “I would not change anything we did on the night.” Survivors shook their heads as she defended the “fantastic” actions of the fire service, recalling the heavy burden of committing crews “to their potential death”.
The inquiry has previously heard from Dr Barbara Lane, a leading fire engineer, that the “stay put” policy had “substantially failed” by 1.26am, when flames could be seen to have reached the top of the 23-storey tower block.
Residents could have escaped during the preceding half an hour, but were told to remain in their flats. The policy was abandoned at 2.47am.
Ms Cotton said that the trauma of the fire, which killed 72 people, had left her with memory blanks and that she was using a PTSD counselling technique to improve her recall of the night, but it had not been “terribly successful”.
She said she deliberately took no notes on the night, struggled to look at images or talk about it, and had not thought about it a “huge amount” since. She described the moment she arrived at the tower, at 2.49am on June 14 last year, saying that she was on the phone to the director of operations and most of what she said was “the F word”. Ms Cotton said that she went into the tower so she could touch some of the firemen and say “nice things” to them in case they did not come out alive.
Ms Cotton and other officials may face prosecution over potential health and safety breaches that allegedly contributed to the deaths.
The fire is thought to have spread from a fourth floor flat when a UPVC window melted, exposing combustible insulation. Multiple fires then spread within the cladding system that contained polythene, carrying the fire around all four facades, penetrating the flats, in just over three hours.
Natasha Elcock, from the survivors’ group Grenfell United, said warnings from previous tower block fires, such as Lakanal House, Camberwell, in 2009, were not taken seriously, especially where cladding was concerned.
She said: “To hear Dany Cotton say that she would not have done anything differently is heartbreaking and feels disrespectful to 72 people who lost their lives. To not prepare for a repeat of Lakanal House and say chances are like a space ship on the Shard is flip- pant and disrespectful. If anything, her answers suggest a culture of complacency and focus on damage limitation. People are going to bed tonight in towers with cladding on and change needs to come fast to keep them safe.
“LFB didn’t wrap the tower in a petrochemical blanket and lives were saved by very brave individuals within the fire service. However by equal measure, mistakes were made with tragic results. It’s disappointing and frustrating that the head of the fire service cannot accept those failings and learn from them.”
Failure of information
In a tense day of evidence, Ms Cotton faced hours of questions from Richard Millett QC, the leading counsel for the inquiry, as it was heard that there were a number of important documents and information missing for the tower, including an insufficient information plate and a blank Operational Risk Database (ORD) document.
Information plates contain essential information about a building and are designed to assist firefighters when they first arrive at the scene. They often include floor counts, and show locations of lifts and stairwells.
Mr Millett asked the commissioner if she felt a failure of crews to previously check that the tower had a premises information plate providing sufficient details was a “serious failure”.
She replied: “I wouldn’t call it a serious failure, I would call it a failure. Because it didn’t impact on the ability to respond on the night. They were familiar with all of the things they were required to be, that information would have been given to them.”
Ms Cotton was shown the operational contingency plan – that gives firefighters detailed information about the building and a plan about how to proceed – for Grenfell Tower. She admitted a “woefully inadequate” amount of information was available on the brigade’s database, which firefighters access via the ORD system. Under a “plans and images” section, there was just one aerial picture of the tower’s roof, while a “tactical plan” was dated 2009, seven years before the tower was refurbished, and had no tactics on it.
“It’s not ideal to have essentially no operational contingency plan on your ORD is it?” asked Mr Millett.
“Not at all,” replied Ms Cotton, but argued that: “The lack of detail around a tactical plan would not necessarily have hampered a professional officer like Mike Dowden’s [watch manager] ability to respond to the initial fire.”
No training on cladding
The inquiry was shown a 2016 slide show prepared by LFB fire engineers and shared among safety officers at the time when Ms Cotton was director of safety and assurance. It detailed fires similar to the one that took hold at Grenfell Tower and the risks. Titled Tall Building Facades, it was produced in response to the Shepherds Court fire and warned of “new construction materials and methods” being used in facades “with a limited understanding of their fire behaviour/performance”.
Ms Cotton said she did not see the presentation and said that even since Grenfell she only “looked through it but I’ve not studied it in detail”.
She insisted repeatedly there was no way firefighters could be expected to know if the cladding was flammable and claimed that they would still not have been able to put the fire out due to the waterproof nature of the material.
She said flammable cladding should never have been placed on the outside of a high-rise building.
When pushed on whether she had ever received training on the spread of fire on cladding, she said this had never taken place, despite being in the service since she was 18. She said preparing for a situation like Grenfell would have been like preparing for a “space shuttle to land in front of the Shard”.
Stay-put advice
Ms Cotton said of the “stay put” policy: “It’s the absolutely correct policy.” She told the inquiry people would have been told “to stay in their flat” by control room officers if there was no direct risk to them, such as flames or smoke.
She was asked if she had any doubts about the policy’s use at Grenfell. She replied: “No, because we had never experienced anything like that. We had never seen such a significant failure of a building. Buildings are designed for the fire to stay within the compartment of origin for 60 minutes.
“What we don’t seek to do is assume every single building will fail. If we were to work on that assumption … it would make our jobs untenable.”
She acknowledged the importance of the police investigation and public inquiry, but she said the brigade “should never have been put in that position to have responded to that incident in that way”.
Questioned why she did not ask officers upon arriving to the scene why the advice to residents had not been changed earlier, she said: “At that moment in time it was far more important to collect the information with the ongoing situation. The priority at that point was to save life.”
When questioned about why the “stay put” policy was not revoked earlier, Ms Cotton said it was due to the “very narrow” single staircase evacuation route.
She said: “People were trapped by smoke and it would’ve added to congestion on the stairwell. Bringing people out at that moment in time would have added to the casualties and delayed the response.”
When pressed further by Mr Millett on the “stay put” policy, Ms Cotton said: “I think I’ve just explained it but I’m happy to go through it again, if you like, about why it wasn’t revoked.”
This response drew sighs and muttering from members of the public.