British inquiry begins into ‘death trap’ Grenfell highrise
Early testimony suggests many failures contributed to 72 deaths in 2017 fire
LONDON— Britain’s highly charged official inquiry into the causes of last year’s deadly Grenfell Tower fire began this week in a cramped room filled with the bereaved and a lot of lawyers.
Testimony by experts quickly revealed that one failure after another likely contributed to the deaths of 72 residents. Water pressure for the fire hoses was low. Systems to vent smoke failed. Firefighters urged people to “stay put” in their apartments rather than run for their lives.
Perhaps worst of all, the building materials used to refurbish the facades of the 24-storey public housing building a year earlier were combustible — and apparently had not been subjected to rigorous British fire tests. Grenfell Tower lit like a torch. “I have never seen a building where the whole of it was on fire. Nobody has ever seen that. It was incredible,” London Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton told the inquiry.
The inferno on June 14, 2017, was an astonishingly fast, highly aggressive and unusual event. Before the flames were extinguished, the tragedy ignited a political crisis in Britain, with a story line emerging about extreme inequality. Among those killed in the fire were immigrants, children, the elderly, the poor and their pets — most of them trapped by smoke and flames on the upper floors, hours after the first firefighters arrived. This happened in one of the wealthiest boroughs of London, where the average selling price for a home last year was almost $3 million (U.S.).
As Prime Minister Theresa May and her Conservative Party scrambled to respond — and as condemnation rained down on the local Tory-led counsel in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea — some wondered whether the government might fall. Or whether the lasting image of May would be something akin to the photograph of president George W. Bush flying in Air Force One over hurricane-ravaged New Orleans and later complimenting his disaster chief for doing “a heck of a job.”
Now, survivors are openly challenging authorities to explain why their public housing block was, in the words of one fire brigade union representative, “a highly combustible death trap.” Lawyers for the families from Grenfell said it was “inhumane” for the local council, which oversees public housing, and its contractors to withhold information. One lawyer alleged that people in London live or die in fires depending on their race.
Modern buildings are specifically designed not to spontaneously combust but to contain fire, room by room, floor by floor. But a chilling time-lapse video, recorded by onlookers and shown in the inquiry room this week, showed Grenfell Tower quickly swaddled in flame. Onlookers are heard crying out to those inside, “Get out! Get out!” Seeing it, some survivors and relatives of the dead sobbed; others slumped in their seats. These were their family members and friends.
Inquiry chair Martin MooreBick, a retired justice of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, called the video “truly shocking.” Lead counsel Richard Millett warned the designers, builders, suppliers and decision-makers not to “indulge in a merry-go-round of buck passing.” But no one was accepting any responsibility.
The government-sponsored, independent inquiry now underway is charged with examining the circumstances leading to the fire and its aftermath. The panel promises to establish facts and make recommendations to prevent a similar tragedy.
This will take months — or years. Such high-level inquiries in Britain are rare and have a checkered past. A string of coroner’s inquests, police investigations and independent panel reports into the deaths of 96 fans in 1989 at the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield — they died in a crushing stampede — took years to complete. It was not until 2017 that the first charges of manslaughter by gross negligence were filed.
The first week of Grenfell testimony laid out a jaw-dropping cascade of failure — from the proper testing of rain cladding products, to enforcing building codes and basic fire safety measures, to what one authority called “a culture of non-compliance.”
The bereaved, survivors and residents — known to the inquiry as the BSRs — desperately want someone held to account.
The Grenfell fire inquiry is not a criminal or civil trial, but the evidence gathered will clearly inform both.