The fires that foretold Grenfell

On the 14th June 2017 people across the country watched as Grenfell Tower burned. A BBC documentary, The fires that foretold Grenfell, aired on 25th October 2018, tells the story of how lessons from other UK tower block fires were ignored. Previous tower block fires predicted the tragedy at Grenfell. There were actually five missed opportunities to prevent the Grenfell tragedy. Key lessons from five previous tower block fires were ignored. The BBC documentary attributes the Grenfell Tower fire to decades of failures. One of the biggest failures was in building regulations that allowed the tower to be wrapped in cladding that turned the tower block into an inferno. And that people were told to stay put in their homes as the fire raged. There were also failures to protect the building from the spread of fire, which created a death trap on the 14th June 2017 and claimed the lives of 72 people. Five previous tower block fires were warnings that should have stopped the tragedy at Grenfell. Catherine Hickman tragically lost her life, along with five others, in the Lakanal House fire. Her sisters watched the Grenfell blaze on TV in horror that something like Lakanal could happen again. Catherine died in the Lakanal blaze because she adhered to instructions to stay put. The ‘stay put’ policy during a fire of this nature isn’t inherently unsafe, so long as flats are properly hermetically sealed and fire retardant. This wasn’t the case at Lakanal House. Neither was it true at Grenfell Tower. After the fire at Lakanal House, the coroner recommended that sprinklers should be retro-fitted in all tower blocks and that the ‘stay put’ policy should be reviewed. In August 1973 a fire at Summerland, an indoor holiday complex on the Isle of Man, claimed 50 lives. The building turned into an inferno because the building was coated with a highly flammable acrylic substance called Oroglas, chosen because it enabled the building to remain warm and enabled visitors to get a tan even while they were indoors. Sprinklers weren’t fitted at Summerland to save money. Eighteen years later newly-installed cladding on the Knowsley Heights tower block in Merseyside caught fire. It was a miracle that no-one was killed in the blaze. But eight years later a similar fire broke out in Garnock Court, a tower block in Irvine, western Scotland, which claimed the life of a 55-year old man and injured five others. Again, recommendations were made to not use combustible cladding on high-rise flats. Six years later, in 2005, two firefighters and a female tenant, whom the firefighters were trying to rescue, lost their lives in a tower block blaze in Harrow Court, Stevenage. Scotland took action after the tragic fire in Ayrshire tightening and devolving building regulation rules. Mr Donohoe, MP for Central Ayrshire until 2015, said in a BBC report that a series of UK governments had been “remiss in their responsibilities and their duties” to people who lived in high-rise properties in England. We believe more could have been done to prevent these tragedies and we will continue to support the campaign to retrofit fire sprinklers in high-rise residential properties.

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