A crime had been committed. This became clear when dawn broke on the burning wreck of Grenfell Tower, west London, on June 14, 2017. As the death toll rose, the obvious questions arose: who was responsible How was it that a municipal block in the UK’s richest neighborhood, renovated just a year earlier, was engulfed by flames that swept from the fourth to the 24th floor in less than 30 minutes? Why did 72 people die?
“We need to have an explanation for this, we owe it to families,” said Prime Minister Theresa May on June 15, 2017. thing after devastating scandals and disasters. and wars: public consultation.
The goal of a public inquiry is to find out what happened and why, and to prevent what happened from happening again. Since 1997, there have never been less than three public consultations at a time. They are usually presided over by retired, trusted judges and white men. Between 1990 and 2017, there were more chairs named William or Anthony than women (the upcoming investigation into Covid-19 chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett is a rare exception). For Grenfell, Theresa May chose a Martin.
Sir Martin Moore-Bick, a retired appellate judge expert in contract law, chose Richard Millett QC, the son of a gentleman of the law, as his lead lawyer. Millett’s job would be to cross-examine witnesses and gather a legal army of 39 lawyers and 10 lawyers to review 320,000 documents. Moore-Bick should make sense of everything.
As survivors and villains celebrate the fifth anniversary of the disaster, investigative hearings are finally coming to an end. It has been a painstaking and costly attempt (£ 149 million and onwards) to find out who is responsible and why. While public investigation will not determine civil or criminal liability, Scotland Yard detectives will suspend their evidence when considering whether to file charges.
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Reporting on the research from day one, I have sometimes been concerned that with 27 commercial organizations and eight public bodies involved in Grenfell’s history, the consultation will never come to a clear answer. In a 21st century economy obsessed with risk outsourcing, witness after witness has repeated that key decisions were “someone else’s responsibility.” The fault was encountered by almost every player, from the architect and the manufacturers to the firefighters and building inspectors.
But conclusions that share the blame and point to a system failure will offer little satisfaction to the bad guys. Did anyone working at Grenfell understand the possible consequences of their decisions? The suggestion that the complexity of testing materials and following safety rules seems to have overwhelmed the professionals involved in a £ 10 million recovery from a town hall tower block was disturbing.
Even more disturbing was the familiarity of much of the evidence in our own working lives. When witnesses, presented with their own email clues, admitted that they “did not open the attachment” that contained any vital instructions or information, it came as no surprise. This is business in the 21st century.
When the investigation publishes its final report in 2023, you may find that the fire was the result of our way of working: flooded with unread emails, constantly exaggerated, isolated from the consequences of our actions, with barely understanding the whole system. Ultimately, this can be more daunting than a guilty verdict against a person or company. It would be an accusation of our entire economy.
First phase: the night of the fire
At 11 a.m. on May 21, 2018, in the ballroom of the Millennium Hotel in west London, the investigation began with eight days of commemoration of the dead. Addressing the gathered survivors and the bad guys, Millett gave a sparse chronology of the fire. It exploded shortly before 12:54 p.m. At 1.29 am, the flames had risen to the top floor of the east façade of Grenfell. At 8:07 a.m., the last surviving resident fled. Millett promised that the investigation would examine the physics of the fire and the response of firefighters, as well as the decisions that had made the exterior of the building lined with flammable material.
“But Grenfell is not a lawyer’s argument or a scientist’s experiment,” Millett said. “Grenfell was at home … a place of refuge … a united community whose members worked, played, prayed and lived together … And many of them died together.”
The next eight days were extraordinarily painful and moving. There were poems, praises and videos. The family of Mohamed “Saber” Neda, a Kabul-born driver who has lived on the top floor since 1999, played his last phone message. “Goodbye,” Dari said. “It simply came to our notice then. Bye. I hope I did not disappoint you. Goodbye everyone. ”
Betty Mendy, sister of Mary Mendy, who died with her daughter, artist Khadija Saye, cried when a cousin’s statement was read: “I hate the night because the night is silent, and the silence brings tears sadness, because that’s when I start to remember the blaze. ”On the second day, 20 or more survivors left the room as a video of the death of six members of the Choucair family showed traumatic images of the burning tower and residents trapped behind the windows.When watching the video, a member of the audience collapsed.
A Grenfell Memorial in 2021. Photo: Graeme Robertson / The Guardian
On June 4, 2018, the investigation moved to a new location, a room in a neo-Gothic Victorian building in London’s legal district of Holborn. Counselors were present in case the survivors needed support, but lawyers from the companies and organizations investigated far outnumbered them. “We hope,” Millett said in his opening statement, “that the main participants will resist the temptation to enjoy a money-making carousel.”
The consultation was divided into two phases. The first phase, which lasted 16 months, was devoted in large part to the events of only seven hours: the period in which the fire was burning and the rescue operations were underway. He heard stories from survivors of thick black smoke filling his flats “as if he were firing from a hose” and heartbreaking final calls to 999 people, including 27-year-old Mariem Elgwahry, a refugee with six others. on one floor of the top floor describing how the flames were rising and about to burst through the windows. “We have nowhere to go,” he said. “We’re stuck.” They all died.
Moore-Bick’s initial 800-page report, released in October 2019, strongly criticized the response of the London Fire Brigade (LFB), suggesting that it should have recognized before the fire was out. control, reversed the “stay” instructions. he had initially communicated to residents, which had been based on the presumption that the fire could not spread throughout the building, and instead ordered the evacuation.
Following the first phase report, Dany Cotton, LFB commissioner, resigned. She had angered the grief by telling the consultation that “nothing would change from what we did that night.” But many survivors were not satisfied with the firefighters’ guilt. Many firefighters had shown courage. Wasn’t that the biggest crime surrounding the tower with a gasoline-burning coating?
Second phase: the dressing and the “horse meat disguised as beef lasagna”
It was the second phase, which began in January 2020, that the bad guys hoped to give them the answers they needed: from the city council, the builders, the companies that manufactured and sold the fuel coating panels and the “experts “in fire safety they had approved them.
Millett started with bad news. With few exceptions, all the written statements he had received from the participants in the investigation were intended to explain how “what happened was, as each of them would have liked, someone else’s fault.” For Grenfell survivors, it was a family return. Many had spent years before the fire being dismissed for their concerns as someone else’s responsibility by the same organizations that were now under investigation. The “money passage carousel” was spinning.
However, the mountain of emails, spreadsheets and reports extracted from the servers of these organizations painted a different picture. The investigation would hear that in 2016, two employees of insulation manufacturer Kingspan had a joking text exchange about the claims he made about the fire performance of his material. One said, “All we do is stretch here.”
In late 2020, after a four-month delay due to Covid-19, the investigation began examining the companies that supplied the materials used in Grenfell’s lethal coating system. As the days went by, the hearings became more and more exasperating for the bad guys, as witness after witness seemed to struggle with memory and insisted that someone else was responsible. Jonathan Roper, who worked for Celotex, the company that made most of the flammable insulation foam used in the 2016 coating, was a rarity. He spoke frankly about the strategies, employed in the name of profit, that contributed to the use of hazardous materials in high-rise buildings.
Jonathan Roper, former assistant head of product at the insulation company Celotex, tested Grenfell’s consultation in November 2020. Photo: Grenfell Tower Inquiry / PA
In May 2012, Roper, then 22, graduated with a degree in business studies from the University of East Anglia, and a few weeks later came to Celotex for his first job. He had no training in construction regulations and knew nothing about insulation. The company was soon taken over by the French multinational Saint-Gobain, which demanded an increase in profits, 15% of which came from new products.
The plan was to simply change the brand of rigid foam insulation panels it was already making and target the high-rise housing market, which was worth about £ 10 million a year. Celotex wanted Grenfell as a “case study” ….