The ruins of Grenfell Tower, which burned on June 14, 2017, killing 72 people, in London. Photos / Andrew Testa, New York Times
When fire broke out at Grenfell Tower in London, the flames were whisked through the 24-storey structure with astonishing speed, killing 72 people in Britain's deadliest housing fire since World War II.
Outrage spread quickly when Britons learned the cheap cladding that shrouded the tower had turned it into a death trap. Prime Minister Theresa May vowed to an enraged nation that "no stone will be left unturned" to make sure the disaster never repeated itself.
Nearly two years after the Grenfell fire in June 2017, this is what we found of the Government's efforts, which have left tens of thousands of people at risk:
— About 16,000 private apartments are still wrapped in the kind of exterior cladding that fed the Grenfell fire.
— Their owners feel trapped in tinderboxes they cannot sell, and some residents have felt compelled to join round-the-clock patrols of their buildings, always on guard for a spark or whiff of smoke.
— The Government did move fairly quickly to strip the dangerous cladding from public housing towers, but people in about 8400 public apartments await a full repair.
— Many of the business-friendly regulations that allowed Grenfell to be built on the cheap remain in place, despite a promise to rethink them top to bottom.
— The Government has been slow to look at other types of flammable coverings that may be putting at least 340 additional apartment towers in danger.
Dangerous cladding and deregulation
A year before the fire, contractors re-clad Grenfell Tower with a form of low-cost aluminum panelling. The cladding was banned in the US and many European countries because if a fire breaks out, it allows the flames to spread quickly.
But English building rules were more lenient. As long as the cladding's surface — the aluminum — was nonflammable, it mattered less what was inside. In this case, that meant a middle layer of plastic that amounted to a sheet of solidified fuel.
When Grenfell caught fire after a refrigerator exploded on a lower floor, the plastic layer ignited and flames bolted up the side of the building, dooming many of the residents. The public housing block was soon incinerated and its scorched shell still looms over London.
To many, the disaster was an indictment of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade in Britain.
Led by Margaret Thatcher, successive British governments diluted hundreds of pages of detailed building rules into much vaguer benchmarks; let private companies take over inspection work; and then, in the mid-2000s, opened the door to flammable cladding with small changes to the guidelines, experts said.
The Grenfell fire was viewed as a watershed. Top officials promised major changes. The commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, Dany Cotton, called it a "turning point" in the country's approach to building safety.
Inspectors began searching for high-rise apartment buildings with Grenfell-style cladding. They found 433 and ordered it removed.
Kensington and Chelsea council made £129m from selling property in the years leading up to the Grenfell fire tragedy – money which we can show for the first time could have prevented cost-cutting on the Grenfell’s renovation work. https://t.co/FjcPtLqt9v
— Jess Brammar (@jessbrammar) May 29, 2019
'Fundamentally unsafe'
But by April of this year, fewer than 100 of the buildings ordered fixed had been taken care of, with 338 of them still bearing flammable aluminum cladding. Living in them has meant daily torment.
"If you think about it all the time, you just go mental," said Rachel Guy, whose 10-storey, privately owned South London apartment building is partly wrapped in the same combustible sandwich of aluminum and plastic used at Grenfell. "You're living in a building that's fundamentally unsafe."
A firefighter told Guy a fire could send flames from the bottom to top of the building within seven minutes. She worried that her mother, 81, would never make it downstairs.
The Government did soon direct £400 million to help local authorities remove the cladding from approximately 150 public housing blocks. That work is happening, if at a pace slower than some might have wanted: A third of the buildings have been fixed, half are mid-repair, and almost all the rest have retrofitting plans in place.
But nobody wanted to pay to remove the cladding from privately owned high-rises.
In England, most private apartments are sold as long-term leases, with the building itself owned by a "freeholder," often an investment group. The law made it difficult for either residents or the Government to hold these building owners liable for the cladding.
In fact, the owners of private buildings like Guy's were pressing residents to pay to replace it. The bill at her building came to £70,000 per flat: an impossible amount for many.
While residents resisted paying for the repairs, there were other costs they could not avoid. Among them were round-the-clock patrols, mandated by local fire brigades, that are supposed to protect people from their building's flammable skin.
Guy, a retired English teacher, paces the hallways of her building three times a week while her neighbours sleep, peering into garbage chutes and sniffing for smoke. Even with residents like Guy taking on shifts for subminimum wages, the patrols cost residents about £200,000 a year.
'Stuck in This Nightmare'
For the most part, it is not luxury apartment towers, but buildings filled with first-time buyers, retirees, working-class people and immigrants that have shouldered the burden of combustible cladding.
"I haven't seen £20,000 pounds since I scrimped and saved to purchase my property," said William Martin, a medical student in Sheffield who was told each apartment had to pay that sum to fix his building's cladding. "My building is still wrapped in what is the most dangerous material known to man, considering what happened at Grenfell."
Unable to sell or remortgage his property, he added: "I'm basically stuck in this nightmare."
The financial and psychological stress is taking a heavy toll. A survey carried out by a coalition of affected tenants found scores of people saying they felt daily anxiety. Home, once a refuge, started to feel like a cage.
After failing to persuade building owners to pay for the cladding repairs themselves, the Government this month allocated about US$254 million for the work.
The new fund was a relief, but hardly a cure-all.
Residents are still on the hook for stopgap safety measures, like new alarms and building patrols. Because the repairs are complicated and specialists are in short supply, waits for fixes could be long, possibly stretching for years.
And the Grenfell-style cladding covered by the Government fund is hardly the only fire propellant lining the sides of English high-rises.
'The Next Grenfell Tragedy'
Guy's high-rise is covered in a tapestry of flammable cladding, not just the Grenfell type.
Among them is a particularly dangerous, widespread variety called high-pressure laminate, or HPL. It emits more smoke and ignites even faster than aluminum cladding.
"Nobody took any notice of it," said Richard Hull, a fire science professor at the University of Central Lancashire. "The next Grenfell tragedy is more likely to be on an HPL-clad building because there's a hell of a lot more of them, and no action's been taken to do anything about it."
HPL is banned from new buildings, but the Government has left it on existing ones.
And HPL is not the only other cladding causing worry. An insulation maker, Rockwool, has estimated 340 recently built high-rise complexes use flammable cladding different from the kind on Grenfell.
The Government says tests on different kinds of dangerous cladding like HPL began last month, though experts have raised concerns about the tests' reliability.
Katie Peate lives in a building in Manchester covered in timber cladding and an insulation system that residents were told was more combustible than Grenfell's. Her building owner wants residents to pay for repairs, at a cost of up to £80,000 per flat. The government fund covers none of it.
Beyond apartment towers, more than 1300 vulnerable buildings like hospitals, care homes, schools and hotels have flammable exteriors, Rockwool estimates, but are exempt from having to strip it because they are not high-rises.
"The big worry now is the Government is going to think this is job done," Peate said. "They didn't realise they were going to open this can of worms."
'Avoid the Blame for Grenfell'
Grenfell exposed a broken system of building safety, where lax construction regulation let developers "race to the bottom," according to a government-ordered review conducted after the disaster.
May held up the Government's response to Grenfell in her resignation speech last week as one of the biggest achievements of her tenure.
But many others saw it differently, with a firefighters' union calling it "disgraceful" that May celebrated efforts that have left lax building rules untouched and tens of thousands of people in danger.
The recommendations of the regulatory review, presented to Parliament a year ago, disappointed many safety experts who had seen it as a golden opportunity for an overhaul.
It did not recommend that fire sprinklers be installed on existing high-rises or on new buildings below 10 stories. It did not ask for a new mandate on second staircases for escaping blazes, which remain optional in many cases, too. And the Government's ban on Grenfell-style cladding applies only to buildings above 18m, or about six stories.
For many fire safety experts, those were head-spinning decisions, signalling an inability — or unwillingness — to reshape the regulatory landscape to prioritise safety over cost.
"The Government's primary objective has always been to avoid the blame for Grenfell," said Jonathan Evans, chief executive of Ash and Lacy, a cladding systems maker. Writing strict new rules, he said, would have been an admission the old ones had allowed Grenfell-style cladding to proliferate.
Written by: Benjamin Mueller
Photographs by: Andrew Testa
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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