As many people will know, one of the worst fires for many years occurred last year at Grenfell Tower, in the borough of Kensington, London on the 14th June 2017. Tragically 72 people died in the disaster which was so unprecedented in the way it spread that a public inquiry was set up to investigate the incident.

The inquiry is available to watch live on the Internet but I have been listening to a BBC podcast, that airs every day the inquiry sits, it is available here and I would recommend that you check it out as it gives a very good summary of the days events.

The Inquiry is still in its early stages and is currently at phase 1 week 5 which has been the fire brigade evidence. The fire service do an absolutely tremendous job, often risking their lives to save people in situations that can only described as very dangerous indeed.

However, during the initial stages of this inquiry they are not coming out of this in a very good light at all. Actually it is the higher ranking fire personnel that seem to be shown to be unable to have managed a very difficult fire on the night.

The fire itself will in my opinion result in prosecutions, probably in respect to the cladding that was installed onto the building, though we have yet to get to that stage of the Inquiry. The first phase is to establish the cause of the fire.

It comes across from the proceedings that the fire did not behave like a normal fire would have done, probably because of the cladding, which altered the characteristics of the building and how it behaved ablaze. It comes across from the evidence given that all went well in fighting the fire initially. The fire service got there quickly and started tackling the fire quickly and actually extinguishing the fire within the flat itself.

What appears to have gone wrong is the management of that fire, the building had a stay put fire policy in place. This is because with these types of buildings it is expected that the fire should not spread and should be dealt with by the fire service without spreading. Therefore it would be considered safer, unless in immediate danger, to stay and await rescue if needed.

However from the evidence given so far it seems that it became clear to many of the fire fighters that the fire had breached the compartment it was in (the fire started in a flat on the 4th floor) and was going to prove very difficult to control. From the evidence given so far it seems there was a lack of communication between those fighting the fire and those in charge of operations on the night. It would appear that this became apparent shortly after the initial fire was extinguished in the flat but had spread to the outside cladding.

Some of these communication problems were due to radio equipment not working, it appears that similar problems occurred to fire fighters at the world trade centre. This apparently is a known problem and there are ways to improve this with the installation of radio amplification systems. This is something I can see will be recommended for all high rise structures in the future.

The first call to the emergency services was at 00:54 am and the first fire fighters entered the 4th floor flat at 01:07 am. It was at 01:29 am that flames had reached the top of the tower after breaching the compartment to set alight the cladding. However the stay put advice was not changed at this point. The stay put advice was finally changed at 02:47 am, over a full hour after the fire had breached its compartment.

Also, the fire service did not seem to have performed the correct actions with regards to earlier familiarisation visits to the tower. From these visits a document is created which is used by the fire fighters, it contains such information as, are there sprinklers, where the fire hydrants are, how many stairwells there are etc, it appears this document was not created for Grenfell Tower. I am not sure how much significance this missing information had on the outcome of the fire and whether it is a requirement for the fire service to create such documents but that revelation understandably did not go down well with the victims families.

If you are interested in this enquiry and can't or don't want to spend the time watching it live, then I thoroughly recommended the podcast which wraps up the day at the inquiry into a 20 or so minute listen. You can then investigate further any interesting aspects that have arisen.