A crime was committed. This was clear when the dawn of the burning remains of Grenfell Tower in West London, on 14 June 2017, dawned. As the number of victims increased, the obvious questions arose: who is responsible? How did a municipal block in the UK’s richest neighborhood, renovated just a year earlier, turn out to be engulfed in flames that came from the fourth to the 24th floor in less than 30 minutes? Why did 72 people die?
“We need to have an explanation for this, we owe it to families,” Prime Minister Theresa May said on June 15, 2017. She resorted to an investigative method beloved by governments that want to be seen doing something after devastating scandals. disasters and wars: public inquiry.
The purpose of the public inquiry is to understand what happened and why, and to prevent what happened from happening again. Since 1997, there have never been less than three public inquiries conducted simultaneously. They are usually led by retired, reliable white male judges. Between 1990 and 2017, there were more chairs named William or Anthony than women (the forthcoming Covid-19 investigation, chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett, is a rare exception). Theresa May chose Martin for Grenfell.
Sir Martin Moore-Bick, a retired appellate judge and expert in contract law, has chosen Richard Milet QC, the lord’s son, as his chief lawyer. Millet’s job would be to cross-examine witnesses and lead a legal army of 39 lawyers and 10 lawyers to review 320,000 documents. Moore-Bull had to make sense of everything.
As survivors and mourners mark the fifth anniversary of the disaster, investigative hearings are finally coming to an end. It was a diligent and expensive – £ 149 million and counting – attempt to figure out who was responsible and why. Although the public investigation will not determine civil or criminal liability, Scotland Yard detectives will weigh the evidence when deciding whether to press charges.
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Given the investigation of its first day, I sometimes worry that with 27 trade organizations and eight public organizations entangled in Grenfell’s history, the inquiry will never come to a clear answer. In a 21st century economy obsessed with the risks of outsourcing, witness after witness reiterates that key decisions are “someone else’s responsibility.” Guilt is found in almost every player, from the architect and manufacturers to the fire and construction inspectors.
But conclusions that share guilt and point to a system malfunction will offer little satisfaction to the bereaved. Has anyone working on Grenfell understood the possible consequences of their decisions? The assumption that the complexity of testing the materials and complying with safety standards seems to have overwhelmed the professionals involved in the reconstruction of 10 million British pounds on a tower in the municipality was worrying.
Even more worrying was how familiar part of the evidence we felt from our own working lives. When witnesses, presented with their own traces of emails, admitted that they “did not open the attachment”, which contains some vital instructions or information, it was not a shock. This is business in the 21st century.
When the investigation publishes its final report in 2023, it may find that the fire is the result of our way of working – overwhelmed with unread emails, constantly overloaded, surrounded by the consequences of our actions, barely understanding the whole system. This can ultimately be more chilling than a guilty verdict against a person or company. That would be the blame of our entire economy.
First phase: the night of the fire
At 11 a.m. on May 21, 2018, in the ballroom of the Millennium Hotel in West London, the investigation began with eight days of remembrance. Addressing the assembled survivors and mourners, Miletus gave a scant chronology of the fire. It exploded shortly before 12:54 p.m. At 1.29 am the flames rose to the top floor of the eastern façade of Grenfell. At 8:07 a.m., the last surviving resident escaped. Millet promised that the investigation would study the physics of the fire and the reaction of firefighters, as well as the decisions that led to the exterior of the building to be lined with flammable material.
“But Grenfell is not a lawyer’s argument or a scientist’s experiment,” Millet said. “Grenfell was home to a place of refuge, a united community whose members worked, played, prayed and lived together… And many of them died together.”
The next eight days were extremely painful and exciting. There were poems, speeches of praise and videos. Mohammed Saber’s family Neda, a Kabul-born driver who has lived on the top floor since 1999, released his latest phone call. “Goodbye,” he told Dari. “We are leaving this world now. Goodbye. I hope I did not disappoint you. Goodbye everyone. ”
Betty Mandy, Mary Mandy’s sister, who died with her daughter, the artist Khadija Saye, wept when a statement was read from her cousin: “I hate the night because the night brings silence and silence brings tears of sadness I began to remember the flames of the fire. “On the second day, 20 or more survivors left the room as the video of the deaths of six members of the Choucair family showed traumatic images of the burning tower and residents locked behind windows. collapsed.
Grenfell Memorial Site in 2021 Photo: Graham Robertson / Guardian
On June 4, 2018, the inquiry moved to a new location, a room in a neo-Gothic Victorian building in London’s legal district, Holborn. Advisors were present in case the survivors needed support, but they were far less than the lawyers of the investigated companies and organizations. “We hope,” Milet said in his opening remarks, “that the main players resist the temptation to indulge in a carousel and hand out money.”
The inspection was divided into two phases. The first phase, which took 16 months, was largely devoted to the events of just seven hours: the period when the fire was burning and rescue operations were underway. He heard the survivors’ stories of thick black smoke filling their apartments “as if firing from a hose” and the heartbreaking last 999 calls from people, including Mariem Elhvahri, 27, sheltering with six others in a top-floor apartment describing the flames. they rose and were about to explode through their windows. “We have nowhere to go,” she said. “We’re stuck.” They all died.
Moore-Bik’s initial 800-page report, submitted in October 2019, sharply criticized the reaction of the London Fire Brigade (LFB), suggesting that it should have admitted earlier that the fire was out of control, cancel the instructions for “Stay put.” it was initially issued to residents, based on the presumption that the fire could not spread throughout the building, and instead ordered an evacuation.
Following the Phase 1 report, Danny Cotton, LFB Commissioner, left. She angered the mourners by saying to the inquiry that “it will not change anything we did during the night.” But many survivors are unhappy with the blame thrown on the fire department. Many firefighters showed courage. Hadn’t the greater crime enveloped the tower in a lining that burned like gasoline?
Second phase: Lining and “horsemeat disguised as beef lasagna”
This was the second phase, which began in January 2020, and the mourners hoped to give them the answers they needed: the council, the builders, the companies that made and sold combustible cladding panels, and the fire safety “experts” who approved them.
Milet started with bad news. With few exceptions, every written statement he received from the participants in the investigation sought to explain how “what happened is, as each of them would like, the fault of someone else.” For the Grenfell survivors, this was a familiar refrain. Many had spent years before the fire, and their concerns were dismissed as foreign responsibility by the same organizations now under investigation. The “merry carousel of divergence” was spinning.
Yet the mountain of emails, spreadsheets, and reports extracted from these organizations’ servers painted a different picture. The inquiry would find out that in 2016, two employees of the insulation manufacturer Kingspan exchanged a humorous text message about the allegations he made about the fire performance of his material. One said, “All we do is lie here.”
In late 2020, after a four-month delay due to Covid-19, the investigation began an investigation into the companies that supplied the materials used in Grenfell’s deadly cladding system. Over the days, the hearings became more and more infuriating for the bereaved, as witness after witness seemed to struggle with memory and insist that someone else was responsible. Jonathan Roper, who worked for Celotex, the company that made most of the flammable insulation foam used in cladding in 2016, was a rarity. He spoke candidly about the strategies used in the name of profit, which contributed to the use of hazardous materials on tall buildings.
Jonathan Roper, former assistant product manager at insulation company Celotex, provides evidence of Grenfell’s inquiry in November 2020. Photo: Grenfell Tower Inquiry / PA
In May 2012, Roper, then 22, graduated in business studies from the University of East Anglia and arrived at Celotex just a few weeks later for his first job. He had no training in building codes and knew nothing about insulation. The company was soon taken over by the French multinational Saint-Gobain, which insisted on increasing profits, 15% of which had to come from new products.
The plan was simply to rebrand the rigid foam insulation panels they had already made and target the multi-storey housing market, which cost around £ 10 million a year. Celotex wanted Grenfell as a “case” …
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