Inferno: The Grenfell Tower ablaze in June last year
Jeremy Selwyn
The full scale of the shocking failings that led to the Grenfell Tower disaster is laid bare in a 200-plus page report leaked to the Evening Standard.
The interim report, the most forensically detailed yet into what really happened in the early hours of June 14 last year, when 71 people lost their lives, has been prepared by fire investigation experts BRE Global.
It is intended to form the first plank of the police investigation.
Dated January 31, 2018 and labelled “draft”, it reveals the shoddy installation of the 2014-2016 refurbishment and catalogues at least five areas where building regulations were breached with catastrophic effect.
They include
- The new windows were too narrow, causing gaps between the window frames and concrete structure that were filled by materials not sufficiently fire resistant, fuelling the blaze’s spread.
- The cavity barriers — meant to seal the gap between the original concrete surface of the building and the new cladding by expanding in the event of fire — were not big enough to fulfil this function. The result was to create a disastrous chimney-like effect between the inner and outer skin of the building.
- The aluminium panels and insulation used in the facade were respectively found to be “highly combustible” and “combustible”.
- The report also exposes other failures to meet building regulations and explains the sequence of how the flames spread from a single fridgefreezer to engulf a 24-storey building.
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