2/2/2024 0 Comments Unherd firemanWe drove back down Grenfell Road and then parked the car in the garage under Hurstway Walk. ![]() … Miguel and I dropped off my cousin and her daughter at the hotel. ![]() ![]() Mr Alves worked as a chauffeur and Mrs Alves as a housekeeper. They had been for an evening out with a cousin of Mrs Alves visiting from South Africa. Mr and Mrs Alves lived on the thirteenth floor. The disaster created a wound in the body politic, the knife has to cut cleanly without fear or favour. That means that the various parties are perfectly entitled to ask questions including difficult questions… We have said very clearly that we want to get to the truth of what happened and why. … we have alerted FBU members to the fact that the Inquiry will be a long and difficult process. This may seem unfair on the firefighters that night but as Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigade Union said, Phase Two of the Inquiry starts sometime in 2020 and will look at the responsibility of the firms that carried out the refurbishment and at the planning decisions of the Borough Council.Ī Tragedy of Errors? You can say they never should have wrapped the Tower in inflammable cladding but London Fire Brigade (LFB) has to face up to system and operational failure cruelly exposed by the scale of the fire. I cover that phase of the Inquiry, the evidence of the firefighters and other professionals at the scene that night, the evidence of the bereaved survivors and residents and the scientific evidence. The first phase got to work in June 2018 hearing evidence about what happened that night and (from the resident’s point of view) during the recent refurbishment. What follows is my track as I followed the Inquiry live on Youtube.Ĭhaired by retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick the Inquiry team divided the work into two phases. A friend from childhood traced me and called me up man it just went up like a cardboard shoe box…Ī Public Inquiry was set up by Teresa May’s Government to determine the cause of the unprecedented nature of the fire spread and the high mortality. Seeing those streets and people on the television news I was transfixed. Grenfell Tower was built in the neighbourhood I grew up in. By four o'clock that morning seventy residents had lost their lives. There was no general alarm system and as was normal in concrete blocks residents were told to stay put in their flats. ![]() There was one stairwell to handle residents trying to escape and firefighters trying to rescue them. The high temperature fire in the cladding then punched back thru into different floors, the smoke and toxic fumes confused and overwhelmed the automatic vent system. Within nineteen minutes fire had raced to the top of the Tower. The fire started in a fridge freezer on the fourth floor then found its way out by the window into the insulation layer of the newly fitted external cladding. The block was social housing, home for people from many troubled countries.Ī firm called Rydon had recently carried out a major re-furbishment on behalf of the owners, Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council. Reaching one hundred per cent physical limits and seeing the things I did has given me a level to measure later happenings in my life.Īt the end of the Muslim religious fast of Ramadan during the night of 13/14 June 2017, a blaze took hold of a twenty three storey block called Grenfell Tower in Notting Dale, West London. On watching the Grenfell Tower Fire InquiryĪ text documentary by Matthew Hilton from transcriptsĪs a young man with a family to keep I did time in the Fire Service.
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