Londoners awoke this morning to find that the Grenfell Tower, a 24-story block located near the Westway and Latimer Road Underground, had suffered a major fire during the night. As many as 40 fire appliances and 200 firefighters attended the blaze, which broke out just before 0100 hours. At least six people are known to have died, with the grim knowledge that “the death toll is likely to rise”.
Grenfell Tower - still ablaze this morning
And while residents, many still in shock, are comforted by their fellow locals, charities and places of worship representing many faiths, the speed at which today’s news media operates means that the questions have begun to be asked. Why did the fire spread so rapidly in a building that had been recently refurbished? And if, as has been suggested, the Grenfell Tower was compartmentalised, why was staying put not a good thing?
That refurbishment is already coming under scrutiny, and for good reason. The external cladding applied to the building we know all too well: it was specified as “Rayondbond”, but this is a mis-spelling. The cladding is called Raynobond (the use of the term “Raynolux”, another trade mark of the same company, gives the game away.
Raynobond, as the blurb confirms, “is an aluminium panel consisting of two coil-coated aluminium sheets that are fusion bonded to both sides of a polyethylene core”. The approval from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to go ahead with refurbishing the Grenfell Tower with this cladding was dated 30th September 2014.
However, and here we encounter a game-changing however, the following November, a building called the Lacrosse Tower, in Melbourne’s Docklands, caught fire. In April 2015, ABC reported that “Substandard cladding has been blamed for the rapid spread of a fire that caused more than $2 million worth of damage to a high-rise apartment building in Melbourne's Docklands in November”. And what kind of cladding would that have been?
ABC again: “The cheap cladding used on the Lacrosse building, called Alucobest, has aluminium on the outside and polyethylene, or plastic fibre, inside and has been found to be highly flammable … In a CSIRO test of combustibility commissioned by Melbourne's Metropolitan Fire Brigade, Alucobest caught fire in less than a minute … The cladding that should have been used is called Alucobond. It has the same aluminium outside but has a mineral fibre core inside, which is fire resistant”.
The Lacrosse Tower cladding was similar to that applied to the Grenfell Tower. The ABC report ominously observed “Since the Lacrosse fire, it has emerged potentially thousands of buildings in Australia could be covered with the same sort of material”. What rather a lot of UK local authorities might now be wondering, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, is just how many similar refurbishments they may have signed off.
Local action groups had forcefully expressed their concerns about the Grenfell Tower refurbishment. Now, it seems, those concerns were right. The Lacrosse Tower fire was there for all to see, yet buildings like the Grenfell Tower continued to be refurbished, and left with the cladding that was reported to have “gone up like a matchstick”.
And that’s before the effects of fire service cutbacks on building safety inspections. So perhaps those taking the decisions would like to pony up some answers.
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