On June 13th, 2017, a calm night in North Kensington, London, quickly turned to chaos when a resident of the Grenfell Tower apartment complex awoke to find that a malfunction in their refrigerator had sparked a fire in their kitchen. 36 hours later, Grenfell Tower was destroyed, seventy-two people had died, and seventy more were injured in what has become known as the single worst residential fire in the UK since World War Two. The Grenfell Disaster has since led to sweeping reforms worldwide in building codes, fire response strategies, and city crisis management processes that are ongoing today. Here’s what went wrong, and what’s changed in the hope that this never happens again.
What went wrong?
The three key factors contributing to the Grenfell disaster’s scope: the building’s construction, the fire response protocols, and the city’s broader response failures.
Construction
The tower was constructed for pure strength, following the Ronan Point disaster in 1968. This meant thick concrete walls and fire doors that would isolate a fire within a single apartment should one occur. This also led the architects to assume that a full-building evacuation would never be necessary, meaning there was no centrally activated fire alarm and only one stairwell. Then, in 2015-2016, new aluminium composite cladding was added to the tower’s exterior to improve energy efficiency. When the fire happened, this highly combustible cladding also created a chimney effect that allowed the blaze to travel vertically and horizontally, entering other apartments through windows.
Protocols
Grenfell was one of many London apartment towers operating under a “Stay Put” policy, where fire brigades tell residents to stay in their homes if their own apartment isn’t actively burning. This policy was held in place for longer than was safe for the majority of residents, drastically slowing the evacuation and causing many to become trapped within the burning building.
City Response
In the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report, the independent investigation committee found that:
“The Council was systemically ill-equipped to deal with a serious emergency… RBKC did not have an effective emergency plan that was directed to the displacement of a large number of people from their homes… RBKC’s plans did not include a system for obtaining a large amount of emergency accommodation at short notice. Nor, significantly, did it make any provision for identifying those who had been evacuated or for communicating with them.”
This is just a short summary of the massive degree to which the governing Council failed in addressing both the emergency and the aftermath. Senior Council staff had been repeatedly warned that the existing training and planning protocols were not sufficient to address a crisis – and when Grenfell inevitably happened, that poor management resulted in nearly non-existent inter-agency communication, severely slowed response times, the drawing out of the Stay Put policy, and, subsequently, deaths.
Now, what’s changed?
In the wake of the Grenfell disaster, a wide range of reforms have been enacted in legislation and regulations, emergency training procedures, and technology adaptations that work together to prevent similar events from happening again, and give London’s boroughs improved preparedness and new tools should the worst case scenario occur.
Changes in legislation and regulation
There have been four key pieces of legislation passed in the seven years since Grenfell that aim to prevent similar events from ever reoccurring. They are:
Building (Amendment) Regulations 2018, designed to completely ban combustible materials being used in or on building exteriors.
Fire Safety Act 2021, which established an official Building Safety Regulator and expanded fire safety assessment requirements to include external parts of a building.
Building Safety Act 2022, which gave residents and homeowners greater powers for holding safety defects to account and protections against bearing the costs for building updates.
Higher-Risk Buildings Regulations 2023, which defines clear safety responsibilities for building management companies working within high-risk buildings. It also outlines a new “Golden Thread” strategy for information management, whereby all of a building’s documents and information must be collated into a single electronic source of truth accessible to any authority that needs it, increasing safety transparency across the country.
Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEPs) are also now a requirement for building managers to have on-hand if they house any residents with disabilities, limited mobility or sensory impairments.
Training and preparedness enhancements
The many inquiries that began in the wake of Grenfell have revealed significant knowledge gaps across both the fire and safety sector and within professional teams in other industries, particularly building management. This includes:
Joint exercises and simulations: Teams from fire, medical, and other emergency service departments are now required to undertake regular joint training that simulates the response to events on the scale of Grenfell, creating better preparedness and decision making ability in the moment.
Enhanced Fire Marshall training: People of any profession who have assumed the role of Fire Marshall within a building now have access to enhanced training built alongside fire safety experts, designed to equip them with the necessary skills and knowledge to prevent, detect, and manage fire risks effectively. Additionally, refresher courses are required at regular intervals to ensure the most up-to-date techniques are applied by Fire Marshalls.
Passive fire prevention training: Professional bodies such as the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Institution of Fire Engineers now provide enhanced qualifications that cover essential knowledge for those working to prevent fires passively through construction and fitout of buildings.
Improvements in technology adoption
As crisis management technology has evolved in recent years, the Grenfell response has been a powerful motivator for city-level managers and emergency services to adopt new platforms like Chronicler which allow for faster and clearer inter-agency communication during the response and recovery phases of emergencies, as well as allow authorities to manage their building information and emergency response plans, ready for use should an incident occur.
Additionally, unmanned aerial vehicles, powerful sensors, and real-time data analytics are all technologies which have reached viability in the years since Grenfell that are allowing emergency responders to more accurately assess an emerging situation and protect civilians from further harm.
The Grenfell fire was an unmitigated tragedy, at a scale rarely seen outside of natural disasters in modern times. It brought keen world-wide attention to severely lacking construction regulations, and created immense pressures on emergency response departments to update their processes with modern solutions. These sweeping safety reforms are a net positive for not just the UK, but every country that was at a similar infrastructural level. Here at Chronosoft, we’re proud to be working alongside the Greater London Authority to help protect citizens and responders alike from ever having to experience such devastation again.
If you’re interested in learning more about how Chronosoft’s products can help your city’s incident management processes evolve, head over to https://www.chronosoft.com.au/ today.
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