‘Show Me The Bodies How We Let Grenfell Happen’ By Peter Apps
A disaster decades in the making
“Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum”/“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”
Peter Apps has just won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing — previously known as the Orwell Prize for Books — for the above-titled book. I intend to discuss the book by investigative journalist Peter Apps, for CounterArts. He broke a story on combustible cladding only 34 days before the fire at Grenfell. Metaphoric emergency alarm bells should have gone off immediately but there were no real communal alarm bells in Grenfell Tower.
I would strongly suggest you read his book. However, my discussion might give you an idea of what you will be facing and an informed decision can be made whether you read the book or not.
It has been — as I am sure you can imagine — a challenging read emotionally and I was, I have to tell you, assisted by my windows being wide open on a hot June day in Middlesex and the sounds of young children playing and laughing on a trampoline next-door. Without them, it would have been an even tougher read.
But the whole point is that it should not be an easy read.
There are a few upsetting parts that deal with the people inside the burning tower block and the author gives a timeline for each person and their harrowing and disturbing experiences of the designed Inferno. Permission was given for the author to use their terrifying experiences.
But these are placed as alternating chapters with the creation of Grenfell Tower, its appalling maintenance history, Kensington and Chelsea Borough Councils' enforced financial decision — unable to afford the cost to knock it down — to cheaply refurbish, and the chronology of the response by LFB on that catastrophic morning for the residents of Grenfell Tower.
So the book does not overpower you emotionally too quickly but it slowly builds the timeline of the fire. Within this arises the utter incredulity and then visceral anger at those who deliberately made, promoted, and sold the cladding that was highly flammable to make a profit on KCBC’s decision to refurbish Grenfell rather than knock the faulty and already failing tower blocks down.
The residents had already been facing years of neglect and lack of maintenance and then the work on the refurbishment was carried out on the cheap. The cladding known as Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) was first invented in Germany in the 1960s and would be sold for Grenfell by Arconic.
There are 3 varieties and 2 types of primary fixing for the cladding. The one that was highly flammable was the cheapest on the market and that was the one chosen for Grenfell but the high flammability was unknown to those outside of the conspiracy of silence. It had failed every fire test even those that had been rigged with cement blocks as the containing structure.
However and almost beyond belief this flammable cladding had received certification based on non-disclosure of devastating fire-safety tests, false information included as part of a sophisticated marketing package with other fire-resistant cladding to mislead, completely ignoring requests for clarification on its use, and heavily discounted price for Grenfell to entice its procurement for the refurbishment of the tower.
To add to the fact that the ACM cladding sold for the refurbishment was made of two pieces of aluminum with a core of highly flammable and toxic plastic — basically, a can of petrol when liquified by fire— which allowed for greater flexibility the actual fitting in situ had left gaps in the installation which were then ‘made good’ with foam.
When the fire started this all added to the quickness with which the fire spread. Everything melted and burnt and the melting materials created an Inferno that rapidly spread up and around the building with nothing to delay it. Even the fire doors were of no use within each level. More plastic and not hard wooden protection. And most of them had to be open for the hoses of the firefighters which allowed toxic smoke to rapidly spread internally throughout the building. Only one lift was working and unlike fire safety regulations all over Europe which require 2 staircases, in Britain, only one is deemed necessary.
The people in Grenfell Tower that very early morning as it quickly exploded into an Inferno had no such time to take a break and concern themselves with the faults of the building for they already knew some of the issues but they had no idea about the petrol laden flammable and highly toxic cladding now turning the whole tower into a gigantic bonfire with people inside.
A catastrophe had been predicted on a number of occasions by ex-resident of Grenfell Tower and survivor, Ed Daffarn who was not listened to by Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council. Grenfell Tower had its own Cassandra. She had predicted that Troy would burn and nobody cared enough but Ed Daffarn wasn't just ignored — he wrote letters, emails spoke to the MPs who came and went over the years, and empowered other residents — he was dismissed and smeared as a troublemaker. Speaking truth to power even when you warn them of an impending human catastrophe involving many deaths is still rejected as making it difficult for people in power.
Peter Apps book is very cleverly arranged and put together and is thorough in its analysis of the main actors in this horrendous tragedy. But ‘tragedy’ is nowhere near strong enough a word to use here, for it was created by human decision-makers and human beings who refused and ignored every safety rule for combustible material. Companies make profits and the companies named in Peter Apps book cared not if lives were endangered by their products.
But the government has a duty of care to protect its citizens. Yet the various (Tory) governments starting with David Cameron have been ideologically motivated by deregulation and a bonfire of red tape which has disarmed Health and Safety regulation in Britain. Loopholes were enlarged and the areas where companies could get away with non-disclosure or limited truth were expanded. A blind eye was now government policy. This is how tragedies happen and people die.
Of course, it was a tragedy but a tragedy that could have been thwarted at so many stages of the developing disaster. If all the companies involved from the start in maintaining and then refurbishing Grenfell had been tasked with creating a building that was a firetrap and made real every conceivable problem and hazard for firefighters to face, they could not have created anything more catastrophic to human life than the refurbishment Grenfell Tower. Yet that is what these companies did to cut costs and make a profit.
And this was compounded into a tragedy upon a tragedy by the stay-put policy of the London Fure Brigade. But the LFB was not to know that such flammable cladding had been placed all over Grenfell. It is literally unthinkable but KCBC did exactly that. When fighting a fire in a block of flats ‘compartmentalization’ is the key tool.
Flats ‘normally’ contain the fire and firefighters engage the blaze in only a single limited area. But Grenfell failed compartmentalization because of the cladding and LFB was faced with whole floor levels on fire, high smoke toxicity, limited visibility, and then the catastrophic rapid spread.
The LFB systems for such a catastrophe were not fit for purpose. It was chaos at the scene. With communications failure and lack of information as to where exactly people were in the building, — yellow stick-it notes were used — a coordinated rescue effort floor by floor could not become a strategy implemented.
People were told to ‘stay put’ but the information to get to them and where exactly they were was lacking and confusing. Stay-put should have been rescinded much earlier — the order was changed as it became obvious that the firefighters would be unable to reach many of those now trapped — but such a decision is monumental as it goes against the protection of life by telling people to enter the fire. Yet it could have saved lives.
Yet the firefighters who went into the Inferno time and time again were all heroes. Everyone knew the fire was unprecedented and out of control and they still went up those smoke-filled stairs to get people out. They went in with limited air as the standard issue air tanks have a short supply only and faced white-hot heat and deadly toxic smoke. It was their 9/11 moment of unsurpassed bravery. Thank you.
The final chapters discuss the aftermath of the tragedy and the non-existent response from the local government (KCBC) and National Government to the survivors and the bereaved relatives and those residents not from the tower who were evacuated from their homes nearby. It was left to relatives, friends, the local community, the Muslim mosque, and a few local charities to help.
The response immediately by the powers that be, police, KCBC hierarchy, and the government was of a potential riot and would become ‘our New Orleans’ was a comment made by Theresa May’s national security adviser. The lies and smears were already entering the picture.
And then of course some execrable sections of the British press got involved. Stating that where the fire had begun in the kitchen of a fourth-floor flat the foreign occupier had just packed his bags and left without warning anyone. This was the era of the ‘Hostile Environment’ and the right-wing press jumped on the bandwagon created by the Tory government crackdown on illegal immigration.
Peter Apps does mention the comment made by Sajid Javid in September 2017,
“Would a fire like this have happened in a privately owned block of luxury flats?”
One cannot say for certain but I very much doubt it. Javid’s point does introduce the unassailable fact that the working class is not considered to be worth as much as the higher echelons of our society. Yet many residents of Grenfell had bought their flats and still, they were given the cheapest — and most dangerous — refurbishment possible.
Peter Apps also writes,
“There are a couple more points worth noting about the management of Grenfell Tower. The first relates to race. To what extent did the ethnic make-up of the tower affect the treatment of residents?”
And on the same page, he continues to raise some very damning statistics,
“Grenfell Tower was overwhelmingly occupied by people of colour. On the night of the fire, 85% of those who died were not white.”
Lawyers for the bereaved and the survivors have raised these questions.
The residents of Grenfell Tower were from all over the world and the community was rich in culture and comprised of hard-working and ambitious members of this country. Yet you can — I certainly can — feel that racism and the new ideology of a ‘Hostile Environment’ for anyone even slightly of any shade of colour even if they were paying taxes and buying their own flats was unwanted by many in Kensington and Chelsea. Period.
The question I would ask is,
“Did racism and the ‘Hostile Environment’ contribute to the murder of 72 people — including 18 children — at Grenfell Tower on June 14th, 2017?”
The Inferno of Grenfell Tower was certainly no accident. I await the charges of manslaughter for those involved in providing the ACM cladding, those who decided on the cheapest possible refurbishment, those who fitted the cladding so poorly, those who managed and supervised the refurbishment — or rather did not —and various Housing Ministers for not tightening the rules around fire safety and updating Approved Document B.
We are still waiting for justice for everyone who died that June morning in 2017 and for those that survived and for everyone impacted by such an avoidable disaster.
For Grenfell.