Grenfell Tower was turned into a “death trap” by refurbishment work overseen by the local authority, a lawyer for the victims told an inquiry into fire.
Danny Friedman QC, speaking on behalf of a group of law firms representing survivors and the bereaved, said they were watching the inquiry a “calm rage.”
Mr Friedman said the inquiry would examine how a local authority “instigated and oversaw a refurbishment of a social housing high rise tower block in such a way as to render it a death trap.”
He added: “The royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the tenants management organisation did this with public funds paid to an array of contractors and sub-contractors – none of whom have yet taken any responsibility for what happened.”
Mr Friedman said residents were “fobbed off” and “certainly not treated as equals” when they warned such a disaster could happen.
“Seventy-two people died. Those who escaped owe their lives primarily to chance rather than risk assessment and contingency planning by either the council or the fire brigade,” he said.
He added: “The people you are coming to know have been left to build something out of nothing, and one of the places for them to do so is here.”
Stephanie Barwise QC, also representing the survivors and bereaved, said a “disaster of this scale arising from what started and should have remained a kitchen fire suggests failures at every level of design and construction of the refurbishment”.
She continued: “Of the six commonly recognised layers of protection against fire – namely prevention, detection, evacuation, suppression, compartmentation and the resistance of the structure to the fire – at Grenfell Tower, five of those layers failed.
“That the structure survived is testament to its original solid concrete, virtually incombustible construction.”
The flames would have been elongated by five to 10 times when they entered the cavity of the external cladding systems, as they sought oxygen and fuel, Ms Barwise said.
“That extension of five to 10 times is exactly what Professor Bisby considers happened in the 14 columns in Grenfell Tower,” she said, referring to an expert report.
Quoting Dr Barbara Lane’s report, Ms Barwise described the insulation in the cladding as the lowest class and therefore “woefully low” in relation to the required standard.
Gaps in the windows were plugged with a material derived from crude oil – “the perfect medium for flame spread at the edge of the window”.
She said: “The combination of this highly combustible material and omissions of cavity barriers amounts to a collection of catastrophic failures in construction safety.”
Ms Barwise said: “One of the repeated themes of the last fortnight was how many bereaved and survivors have so many unanswered questions and a desperate need for answers.
“Although they are the ones with the greatest right to know, the general public and the construction industry also desperately need those answers.”
Ms Barwise said regulations stipulate that works carried out must not make a building less compliant than it previously was, which is called a “material alteration”.
“We say, based on Dr Lane’s report, that the entirety of the cladding constituted a material alteration, since, as it stood before the refurbishment, Grenfell was constructed of virtually incombustible concrete.
“It was however covered by the polyethylene cladding now openly described by some in the industry as petrol.”
Ms Barwise said the cladding system had “patently” promoted rather than resisted fire spread.
She added: “Our understanding is that the ignition of the polyethylene within the cladding panel produces a flaming reaction more quickly than dropping a match into a barrel of petrol.”
Ms Barwise said: “Since the turn of the century, both internationally and in the UK, fires involving external cladding systems have become the archetypal form of mass fire disaster.
“This fact put construction and fire engineering professionals on notice of the imperative to develop their risk assessment systems accordingly, and also ought to have informed London Fire Brigade contingency planning.”
Sam Stein QC, who is also representing the victims, said the cost-cutting attitude among those working on the refurbishment led to the disaster,
He told the hearing: “It was the decision by Kensington and Chelsea the local authority, the TMO and its contractor to try to refurbish on the cheap that led to this devastation and this desire.”
On the industry’s persistence in using the type of material used on Grenfell Tower, he said: “Has this failure to deal with dangerous cladding something to do with serial incompetence or had industry become too close to government?
“Remember that the Celotex director Rob Warren made clear on the company website that they were working inside Government to influence policy and regulation industry.”
A guide of how a fire could spread through Celotex material was removed from its website after the disaster last June, he said.
Mr Stein said: “The term corporate or corporates tend to avoid the fact that these companies are run by people and it was people who made the decisions and caused the injuries.”
Later in the hearing, Mr Friedman said the evacuation of the tower had been hindered by the “stay put” policy and then by the over-deployment of firefighters and equipment, which crowded the narrow stairwell – the sole escape route.
He said statements from more than 250 firefighters had revealed a lack of experience of a fire of Grenfell’s scale and a lack of training in the event that one might occur.
They also showed significant communication problems and a lack of training for 999 call operators in the event that a “stay put” policy was abandoned.
He said: “The near-universal view of those witnesses is that this was a fire utterly beyond their professional experience. But it is also clear that it was a fire beyond their training or indeed the London Fire Brigade’s operational contemplation. We say it should not have been.
“And in that recognition of systemic failure of foresight, the inquiry can join this and other fire brigades in remedying what is a violation of the state’s responsibility to have training and policy in place that is fit for responding to foreseeable risk to life in cladding fires of this nature.”
Mr Friedman said this posed a fundamental question: “Did the LFB waste limited temporal and spatial opportunities in trying to fight a fire that could not be fought, rather than immediately prioritising evacuation to save lives?”
Mr Friedman said a number of firefighter witnesses had “emphatically queried the logic” of the “stay put” advice. The advice was withdrawn shortly before 2.47am, nearly two hours after the fire took hold.
A deputy assistant commissioner came to the conclusion at roughly the same time at the control room in Stratford, “triggered at least in part by turning on the television and viewing the fire on Sky News”, Mr Friedman said.
In a statement to the inquiry published on Tuesday, the LFB defended its decision to stick to its “stay put” advice until late into the night, saying the magnitude of the blaze had presented unprecedented challenges.
“The LFB Control Centre was required to handle more calls requiring fire survival guidance from residents within Grenfell Tower on the night of the fire than the total number of such calls in the previous 10 years from the whole of London,” it said.
Stay-put advice was suitable for Grenfell Tower when it was originally built, as fire should have been contained in one flat, the statement said.
“What is less clear, in the view of the LFB, is the extent to which maintenance programmes and refurbishments over the years have undermined the integrity of the original design and construction principles from a fire safety perspective,” it continued.
“This is a vital aspect of the consequences of the Grenfell fire in the LFB’s assessment.”
However, Peter Weatherby QC told the inquiry the statement was “completely lacking” in certain areas.
He said it did not have “any hints that the LFB accepted that their operation on that night went wrong or that the events expose significant strategic, tactical and policy failures”.
Earlier, the inquiry heard from a lawyer for the Metropolitan Police, who said the force had completed its work inside the tower and anticipate it will cease being a crime scene in July or August.
Jeremy Johnson QC, said the force is facilitating visits to the site by core participants of the inquiry.
Mr Johnson said: ”The criminal investigation is progressing in accordance with the intended timescales that we have previously indicated.
“The on-site forensic investigation of the tower is complete, off-site and reconstruction work is ongoing.
“It is anticipated that Grenfell Tower will be released as a crime scene in July or August of this year.”
Additional reporting by Press Association
