British fire safety experts are wondering how the blaze at the Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington could have swept through the apartment block with such speed, with one expert saying if the building's construction materials met British safety standards, then there is something wrong with the standards.
After seeing the images from the fire at the Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington neighbourhood, architect Sam Webb says he was struck by how quickly flames raced up the exterior of the building.
“Certainly, buildings shouldn’t behave in the way that one did in the fire,” Webb told CTV News Channel in an interview from Cambridge, U.K. on Thursday.
“The cladding caught fire, according to witnesses, really quickly -- which means if that cladding complies with building regulations, there’s something wrong with the building regulations.”
The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, which managed the public housing complex, recently spent 10 million pounds (CDN$16.9 million) refurbishing the building over two years. Those upgrades apparently included installing insulated exterior cladding, new windows and a new heating system.
The organization has issued a statement saying it is too early to speculate what caused the inferno and what contributed to its spread. British Prime Minister Theresa May has ordered a full public inquiry.
But Webb says, to his mind, “a crime has been committed here,” because it appears to him that, somewhere along the line, steps weren’t taken to ensure the building would be safe during a fire.
Peter Mansi was also taken aback at how quickly the fire spread. Mansi spent more than three decades with the London Fire Brigade -- almost half of those years as a fire investigator. He says most of the highrise fires he’s seen stay contained to the apartment where they began.
“Even if they breach the window, they don’t spread externally up and around the building, which this one did,” he told CTV News Channel from London.
Mansi, who now works as a forensic fire investigator with Fire Investigations U.K., says he’s seen other buildings that had been refurbished with outside cladding and when they experienced fires, they didn’t spread.
“So this is the big question with this one -- why it spread as quickly as it did,” he said.
The investigation will likely look at what fire-retardant materials were used on the building, as well as how they were put together.
The timelines could be long, however, as Mansi expects efforts to recover the bodies of the victims could take three to four weeks alone.
“This investigation will go on for absolutely months and months. It was a massive fire as you’ve seen and of course there is concern about some of the structural stability.”
Fires that spread across a building’s exterior are known to happen in the Middle East, where cladding is a common building tool, according to John Gales, an assistant professor at Carleton University.
The difference with the London fire, Gales said, was the scope of the blaze.
“The big difference I think with this one versus the other ones is in a lot of those cases, people were able to get out very efficiently and the fire mainly stay on the exterior of the building. In this case, the fire seems very much on the interior of the building,” Gales told CTV News Channel.
Gales said a lack of proper fire escapes made evacuation even tougher.
“So getting people out and getting people out fast with that fire travelling as fast as it did, makes this very scary.”
Webb acted as an adviser to the legal team for families affected in an apartment block fire in July 2009, when a fire raced through a 14-storey building in south-east London, killing six.
He says the coroner in that case wrote to the minister in charge of public housing and said the building regulations dealing with fire were so complicated that nobody could understand them. He said they needed re-writing.
“That was in 2013. Nothing has happened. Why have they not done anything?” Webb wondered.
Ideally, fires in apartment buildings should be confined to the unit itself, Webb said.
“Normally, you would design a building like that so that each flat would be what’s called a one-hour fire compartment,” meaning that the fire would need to burn for at least an hour before it would begin to spread.
That would give the fire brigade enough time to get to the scene and contain the blaze. But even in a poorly designed apartment buildings, he says sprinklers could have helped to contain, slow or douse the fire.
“So by the time the fire brigade got there – and reports say they got there within six minutes, which is really fast – they wouldn’t have had a fire to fight,” Webb said.
The Grenfell Action Group, a local community organization, had warned about fire safety at the building since 2013, noting concerns about the testing and maintenance of firefighting equipment and blocked emergency access to the site.
"All our warnings fell on deaf ears, and we predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time," the group said in a blog post Wednesday.
The private construction firm that completed the two-year refurbishment of the building, Rydon, said in a statement it was “shocked” by the devastating fire. The company said the refurbishment it completed last summer “met all required building control, fire regulation and health & safety standards.”
It added it would be cooperating with investigators and hopes to learn more about the causes of the fire.
With reports from The Associated Press
