Safety last?

In his final article, Sam Webb MBE looks at the architectural, political, and legislative route that led to the Grenfell Tower tragedy.

On 14 June 2017, four days after being elected by 20 votes, Emma Dent Coad, the first ever Labour MP for Kensington and Chelsea, was woken up by the sound of a helicopter. She turned on the radio. Hearing the BBC news, she leapt out of bed. The next thing she remembers is running down the road towards Grenfell Tower.

I was woken up by my phone ringing. A voice said, “Get up. Turn the TV on. It’s happened. A tower block in West London is on fire, from top to bottom.” The call was from Ronnie King, the Fire Adviser/Administrative Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Fire Safety and Rescue Group (APPG). I was an adviser to the APPG, and we had both been expert witnesses to the Families of the Deceased at the 2013 Inquest into the fire which killed six people in Lakanal House, Southwark. We made no secret of the fact we predicted a fire like Grenfell would happen, somewhere in the UK, if nothing changed.

After watching TV for 10 minutes, I called Jane Duncan, then President of the RIBA. Within hours the world’s press would contact RIBA. Weeks earlier, I had sent her a bundle of information about fires in tower blocks abroad where the fire had spread up the outside of the building. That fateful night, Jane and I discussed setting up an RIBA expert advisory group on fire safety and the implications of the Grenfell fire. I made and received many calls. My first email about Grenfell came from a friend in Australia who had switched on her TV.

Passengers flying into Heathrow were streaming it live on Facebook. TV news companies all over the world picked it up. Horrified firefighters, who knew they would have to go into the multi-storey inferno, captured it on their mobiles as they were driven to the fire along Westway. Grenfell was world news long before most people in London had even got out of bed.

As dawn broke, questions began to be asked. Why had this happened? Why had so many died? Why did the council dismiss the fears of the residents about the refurbishment? Why did such a tall building, housing hundreds of people, only have one single, internal stair as the sole means of escape from the building? How did we get here?

As part of the Fire Protection Association's continuing commitment to increase fire safety awareness across the built environment, a number of informative feature articles are available to read on our website.?You can read the full article here.