“We have to have an explanation for this, we owe it to the families,” Prime Minister Theresa May said on June 15, 2017. She looked for a research method that loved governments that wanted to see them do something after catastrophic scandals, disasters and wars: public research. The purpose of a public inquiry is to find out what happened and why, and to prevent anything that happened from happening again. Since 1997, there have never been less than three public inquiries at any one time. They tend to be presided over by retired, credible, white male judges. Between 1990 and 2017, there were more chairs named William or Anthony than women (the upcoming Covid-19 search chaired by Baroness Heather Hallett is a rare exception). For Grenfell, Theresa May chose a Martin. Sir Martin Moore-Bick, a retired contract judge specializing in contract law, has chosen Richard Millett QC, the son of a lawmaker, as his principal attorney. Millet’s job would be to examine witnesses and recruit a legitimate army of 39 lawyers and 10 lawyers to comb 320,000 documents. Moore-Bik should understand everything. As survivors and mourners mark the fifth anniversary of the disaster, investigative hearings are finally coming to an end. It was a laborious and costly – 149 million £ and ongoing – effort to understand who is responsible and why. While the public inquiry will not determine civil or criminal liability, Scotland Yard detectives will weigh the evidence when considering whether to prosecute. Receive award-winning extensive Guardian readings sent to you directly every Saturday morning Referring to the research from day one, I sometimes worry that with 27 commercial organizations and eight public bodies involved in Grenfell’s history, the research will never come up with a clear answer. In a 21st century economy obsessed with the risk of outsourcing, witness after witness has reiterated that key decisions were “someone else’s responsibility.” An error was found in almost all players, from the architect and builders to the fire department and building inspectors. But the conclusions that share the responsibilities and indicate the failure of the system will offer the mourners some satisfaction. Did anyone working at Grenfell understand the possible consequences of his decisions? The suggestion that the complexity of the material tests and the observance of safety standards seem to have overwhelmed the professionals who participated in a 10 10 million renovation of a plot of land of the municipal complex was irritating. Even more worrying was how familiar the elements from our professional life were. When the witnesses, who were shown their own email traces, admitted that they “did not open the attachment” that contained some vital instructions or information, they were not shocked. This is a business in the 21st century. When the research publishes its final report in 2023, it can find that the fire was the result of the way we work – it is flooded with unread emails, constantly prolonged, isolated from the consequences of our actions, without understanding the whole system. This can ultimately be more creepy than a guilty verdict against an individual or a company. It would be an indictment of our entire economy.
Phase one: the night of the fire
At 11 a.m. on May 21, 2018, in the ballroom of the Millennium Hotel in west London, the search began with eight days of remembrance for the dead. Addressing the assembled survivors and mourners, Millett gave a sparse schedule of the fire. It broke out just before 12.54. By 1.29 a.m., flames had risen to the top floor of Grenfell’s east façade. At 8.07 a.m., the last surviving resident escaped. Millett promised that the investigation would examine the physics of the fire and the reaction of firefighters, as well as the decisions that had led to the exterior of the building being covered with flammable material. “But Grenfell is not a lawyer’s argument or a scientist experiment,” Millett said. “Grenfell was the home… a refuge. Of 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 moving. There were poems, hymns and videos. The family of Mohamed “Samper” Neda, a Kabul-born rooftop driver who has lived on the rooftop since 1999, played his last phone message. “Goodbye,” he told Darry. “We are leaving this world now. Bye. I hope I did not disappoint you. Goodbye to everyone.” Betty Mendy, Mary Mendy’s sister, who died with her daughter, artist Khadija Saye, wept as a statement was read by a cousin: “I hate night because night brings silence and silence brings tears of sorrow, because that’s when I begin to remember the flame of fire “. On the second day, 20 or more survivors left the room as a video of the deaths of six members of the Choucair family showed traumatic images of the tower burning and residents trapped behind windows. While watching the video, a member of the audience collapsed. A Grenfell Memorial in 2021. Photo: Graeme Robertson / The Guardian On June 4, 2018, the search was moved to a new venue, a room in a neo-Gothic Victorian building in the London borough of Holborn. Counselors were present in cases where survivors needed support, but were far more numerous than the lawyers of the companies and organizations under investigation. “We hope,” Millett said in his opening remarks, “that key participants will resist the temptation to indulge in a carousel of rubble.” The research was divided into two phases. The first phase, which lasted 16 months, was largely devoted to the events of just seven hours: the period when the fire was on fire and rescue operations were in progress. Survivors heard stories of thick black smoke filling their apartments “like falling from a hose” and the shocking last 999 calls of people, including Mariem Elgwahry, 27, who was staying with six others in a rooftop apartment that describe how the flames rose and were about to burst through their windows. “We have nowhere to go,” he said. “We are stuck.” Everyone died. Moore-Bick’s original 800-page report, delivered in October 2019, strongly criticized the London Fire Department (LFB) response, suggesting it should have acknowledged earlier that the fire was out of control, reversing instructions to “stay tuned”. position”. had originally issued to the residents, which was based on the presumption that the fire could not spread throughout the building, and instead ordered an evacuation. In the aftermath of the first report, LFB commissioner Dany Cotton resigned. He had angered the mourners by saying in the investigation that “nothing would change from what we did at night”. But many survivors were unhappy with the responsibility of the fire department. Many firefighters had shown courage. Wasn’t it the biggest crime that engulfed the tower with an investment that burned like gasoline?
Phase two: The investment and the “horse meat disguised as beef noodles”
It was the second phase, which began in January 2020, that the mourners hoped to get the answers they needed: from the board, the manufacturers, the companies that built and sold the flammable investment panels and the fire safety “experts” they had approved them. Millet started with bad news. With a few exceptions, every written statement he received from the survey participants sought to explain how “what happened was, as everyone would say, someone else’s fault.” For the Grenfell survivors, it was a familiar refrain. Many had spent years before the fire dismissing their concerns as the responsibility of someone else from the same organizations now under investigation. The “buck-passing game” was spinning. However, the mountain of emails, spreadsheets, and reports exported from these organizations’ servers painted a different picture. The investigation will hear that, in 2016, two employees of the insulation manufacturer Kingspan exchanged a funny text about the claims he made about the performance of his material in the fire. Someone said, “All we do is lie down in here.” In late 2020, after a four-month delay due to Covid-19, the investigation began examining the companies that supplied the materials used in Grenfell’s lethal investment system. As the days went by, the hearings became more and more outrageous for the mourners, as witnesses after witnesses seemed to have difficulty remembering and insisted that someone else was responsible. Jonathan Roper, who worked for Celotex, the company that made most of the flammable insulating foam used in the 2016 renovation, was a rarity. Speak honestly about the strategies used in the name of profit, which contributed to the use of hazardous materials in high-rise buildings. Jonathan Roper, former Assistant Product Manager at Celotex Insulation Company, cites Grenfell’s research in November 2020. Photo: Grenfell Tower Inquiry / PA In May 2012, Roper, then 22, graduated in business from the University of East Anglia and arrived in Celotex just weeks later for his first job. He had no training in building regulations and knew nothing about insulation. The company was soon acquired by the French multinational Saint-Gobain, which demanded an increase in profits, 15% of which was to come from new products. The plan was simply to change the name of the rigid foam insulation panels he had already built and to target the αγορά 10 million-a-year apartment building market. Celotex wanted Grenfell as a “case study”.
