Fire safety rules rely solely on staying put, Grenfell inquiry hears

Fire safety rules to protect high-rise residents in England rely solely on a “stay put” strategy and do not allow for the use of ladders to save lives, a leading expert has told the inquiry into the Grenfell Tower blaze.

Dr Barbara Lane, the director at the Arup consultancy and expert appointed by the inquiry, spelled out how the failure of the strategy just 32 minutes after the first 999 call meant that the only safety condition provided for was gone.

In a presentation showing how vulnerable Grenfell’s occupants were once the fire spread beyond flat 16, she said the stay-put strategy did not “consider relevant” the possibility of a multi-storey building fire or one that penetrated multiple flats, despite the fact that more than 100 fire doors inside the tower did not meet fire regulations.

Fire swept through the windows, combustible cladding and faulty fire doors of the 24-storey building in west London on 14 June 2017, killing 72 people.

Lane was giving evidence at the restart of the inquiry after a week of events to mark the anniversary of the disaster. For the next three days technical experts are giving presentations. Then up to a month of evidence will be given by firefighters. Lane said the stay-put strategy was part of the building design and not the responsibility of the fire brigade. She added that the same failings that caused the strategy to fail hampered the fire-fighting response.

Under stay put, occupants are told to only evacuate their flat if there is a fire inside it or if it is immediately threatened. Each flat is supposed to be compartmentalised so the fire stays inside the property and does not spread, including through the external walls. There should be fire doors, a smoke control system extracting heat and smoke from the stairs and lobbies.

The inquiry has already heard that there was a litany of failings of compartmentalisation, with dozens of defective fire doors, the failure of smoke extractors and an external cladding system that enabled the fire to spread at astonishing speed.

Lane said that in 2011, before the main refurbishment which involved cladding Grenfell in combustible panels, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation, which managed the high-rise, replaced 106 of the 120 flat doors with fibreglass composite one which offered 30 minutes protection, in line with regulations. But 48 of these contained glazing and their manufacturer, Manse Masterdor, did not test the fire resilience of the door with glass in it, which meant the resistance could have been less.

The 14 that were not replaced were mostly owned by the minority of leaseholders in the tower and would have only offered 20 minutes protection if, as assumed, they were the original doors installed in 1974. Neither were the doors on each landing to the stairs and the refuse chutes replaced. These are required to have greater fire resistance but assuming they were fitted in 1974 they would have offered 30 minutes’ resistance, not the 60 minutes required today.

“Faulty fire doors mean faulty compartmentation and compartmentation is the primary basis of the stay-put strategy,” said Lane.

She told the inquiry that when the tower was originally built between 1970 and 1972, “the external wall of the building was ... entirely non-combustible”, but it was wrapped in combustible materials in the refurbishment between 2012 and 2016.

Nevertheless, she said: “The statutory guidance makes no provision within the building for anything other that a stay put strategy. There is no means of warning nor a means to communicate the need to increase the areas to be evacuated as is currently regulated for other building uses. I consider the building’s stay-put strategy to have failed at 1.26am and that all events after that time occurred in the context of the total loss of the only safety condition provided for.”

The same compartmentalisation strategy was essential for firefighting internally, she said.

“Mitigating a spreading external fire is not incorporated into any of the other protection measures in the building as provided for the firefighters,” she said.

The strategy was only for internal firefighting, and relied on a working firefighting lift, protected lobbies, ways of getting water up the buildings, a protected space between the firefighting stair and the flats. All of these failed to one degree or another.

The inquiry continues.