Some personal reflections on the Grenfell Tower fire
Some personal reflections on the Grenfell Tower fire
In 2022, on the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, I wrote a personal account of the tragedy. I was a Fire Brigades Union (FBU) official in London at the time of the fire and was relatively close to events in the days, weeks and months afterwards.
With the publication earlier this week of the final report of the Grenfell Tower public inquiry, I thought I’d share with my subscribers a few passages from my anniversary piece, before turning to some thoughts about the inquiry’s findings.
Five years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I was suddenly awoken by a ringing mobile phone. Sky News were hoping to speak to a Fire Brigades Union (FBU) official. A fire was ripping through a high-rise residential block in west London, and several people were feared dead.
I switched on the TV and stood horrified at the images of Grenfell Tower ablaze from top to bottom. I had fought fires in high-rise buildings, but never before, in my then 20-year career as a London firefighter, had I witnessed such a spectacle.
Over the ensuing hours and days, I helped co-ordinate the FBU’s response to the tragedy. I heard first-hand accounts from firefighters — some of whom were personal friends and colleagues — who had attended the incident. Despite having shown bravery beyond measure, their testimonies were relayed without drama or self-regard. They had entered the tower uncertain that it wouldn’t collapse around them. Some had hastily scrawled their names on their protective helmets to make sure they could be easily identified in the event they didn’t make it out alive.
Standard operating procedures went out of the window as firefighters did their best to improvise in a situation none had previously encountered. Amid the ferocious heat and thick, acrid smoke, some had removed their breathing apparatus facemasks and planted them over the faces of casualties. Incredibly, a number of firefighters entered the burning tower several times. One crew had even tried to fight its way up the entire length of the building in a bid to reach the roof and drench the flames from above. Others, having taken themselves to their physical and mental limits, collapsed as they exited the tower. The effects of exhaustion caused some to vomit.
Back at the 999 call-handling centre in Stratford, east London, operators were taking a stream of harrowing calls — the details of which will remain with them for ever — from trapped residents. I spoke later to a manager at the centre, Peter May, the most unassuming of men. During those desperate hours, he was almost single-handedly responsible for organising the deployment of hundreds of firefighters and scores of engines, striving to ensure that, as more and more resources were directed to the tower, the rest of the capital was not left without fire cover. Peter’s testimony is a matter of public record. People like him are quiet heroes.
As the smoke cleared, literally and figuratively, we in the FBU tried to make sense of this most appalling of tragedies. Questions raged. How in an advanced Western city could more than 70 residents settle down for the night in an apparently safe block of flats, yet perish before sun came up? How in a society so obsessed with health and safety and red tape was it possible for potentially lethal cladding to be fixed not only to Grenfell Tower but, as we came to discover, hundreds of other high-rise buildings across the country? How was this any different to dousing these buildings in petrol and just hoping that no-one would ever put a match to them?
Well, with the publication of the inquiry’s final report, we now have the answers to those questions. The inquiry found that the fire happened because of a combination of corporate greed and government recklessness. Construction companies that made and sold the cladding involved in the fire were guilty of ‘systematic dishonesty’. They knew that tests showed the cladding to be potentially dangerous, but they concealed that information. Meanwhile, the David Cameron government, and particularly his secretary of state at the Department for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, were obsessed with cutting ‘red tape’. This created an environment in which crucial issues relating to building safety were dismissed or long-grassed.
To compound matters, a historical agenda of deregulation, for which the Blair government deserves its share of blame, and the privatisation of a vital building standards body – the Building Research Establishment – led to a fragmented system in which oversight, reporting and accountability were wholly inadequate.
It wasn’t like any of this was unforeseen. The FBU had for years been warning of the dangers of deregulation and privatisation. Chillingly, it also raised the alarm about the risks of external cladding on high-rise buildings. In 1999, it told a select committee of MPs:
The primary risk therefore of a cladding system is that of providing a vehicle for assisting uncontrolled fire spread up the outer face of the building, with the strong possibility of the fire re-entering the building at higher levels via windows or other unprotected areas in the face of the building. This in turn poses a threat to the life safety of the residents above the fire floor.
Grenfell Tower is a tale of what can happen when the desire for a fast buck is elevated over public safety, and when those in authority are so blinded by political ideology that they fail in their duty to avert the likely ensuing catastrophe.
Seventy-two souls paid with their lives in west London in the dark early hours of that morning back in June 2017. Every death was avoidable. And that is the real tragedy.
A reminder that you can follow me on X/Twitter: @PaulEmbery
Paul, I was also at that dreadful place on the day, with the police though, and I can confirm everything you said in there.
As for SOPs going out of the window, the Met’s TSG were present and the burning remnants of the cladding were falling on the crews who were trying to control that blaze. The TSG donned flameproof overalls and used the long riot shields to hold over the LFB staff engaged in fire fighting to protect them. Unfortunately the rumour got round they had ‘kitted up’ to stop the residents rioting. Nothing is further from the truth.
Luckily I saw little that was distressing but a story will haunt me forever. The body of a young child was found on a mezzanine floor. It was under five. I have a vision of that poor little sod getting separated from its parents in the panic, lost, and trying to find them, no doubt crying and in great distress, until overcome. I don’t think about it often now, thank heavens but when I do I feel quite uncomfortable - and I am not LFB who found the body.
I know your guys also broke their own rules re Breathing Apparatus. They couldn’t get to the top of the building constantly breathing in them as the air would run out so at great risk to themselves they took it off - against H&S regs no doubt - where they could, to preserve the oxygen they carried.
I can still see the fire fighters and ambulance staff crashed out on the grass around the estate there next morning, exhausted and mainlining water. On that day, you could not have paid anyone enough to do what those men and women did. It was pure public spirit and a desire to help those in distress, the greatest most generous human emotions were on display.
Contrast that with the powers that were involved in the cluster f- - k that got them all there. Corporate greed, regulatory incompetence and disregard. And those individuals mainly have salaries and bonuses that the humble fire fighters would never see.
Words at this point fail me, so I salute the heroes of your organisation and ambulance service who did what they could in a once-in-a-lifetime event, and mourn those who died absolutely needlessly to make a tower block look nicer.
The most important action now is prosecution of individuals at the highest levels.
I work in Construction Safety and if an Architect,Quantity Surveyor,Building Control Officer or Fire Consultant or H&S Professional goes to prison it will be a game changer.
Council Officials should also be prosecuted.
The HSE now have teeth with the new BSR organisation being set up to scrutinise new hugh rise projects.
But one issue that we’ll never know about is the figure of 72 fatalities being the correct figure.
With a housing crisis were flats sublet with overcrowding by people who can’t afford to pay the rents in an area in Zone 2 in London.
And whose benefit was the cladding for???
The residents or the Nottingham Hill set who would have seen this Council type high rise block as an eyesore.
I hope this doesn’t become a drawn out process like Hillsborough and justice is done.
72 people should never have died in 21st Century Britain!!!!!