What Colour was the Smoke?: A Tragedy of Errors. Watching the Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry.

By Matthew Hilton

"What colour was the smoke?" is a text documentary about the fire in a public housing block, Grenfell Tower, that killed seventy two people in June 2017 in West London. The Government ordered an Inquiry under a Judge. The author followed the Inquiry for six months and uses the actual language of the firefighters, scientists and other professionals at the scene that night and above all the words of the bereaved, survivors and residents to present a condensation of the tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: apwb
• Release date: Feb 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463277553

Book preview

What Colour Was The Smoke?

A Tragedy Of Errors

On watching the Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry

A text documentary by Matthew Hilton from transcripts

and written statements available at

www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org

cuts indicated by … …

… he do the police in different voices…

Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend 1865

Introduction

As a young man with a family to keep I did time in the Fire Service. I'm glad I did. 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.

At 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. The block was social housing, home for people from many troubled countries.

A firm called Rydon had recently carried out a major re-furbishment on behalf of the owners, Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council. 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.

Within nineteen minutes fire had raced to the top of the Tower. 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. There was one stairwell to handle residents trying to escape and firefighters trying to rescue them. There was no general alarm system and as was normal in concrete blocks residents were told to stay put in their flats. By four o'clock that morning seventy residents had lost their lives. Two died later.

Grenfell Tower was built in the neighbourhood I grew up in. Seeing those streets and people on the television news I was transfixed. A friend from childhood traced me and called me up man it just went up like a cardboard shoe box…

A 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. What follows is my track as I followed the Inquiry live on Youtube.

Chaired by retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick the Inquiry team divided the work into two phases. 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.

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. 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.

A 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. This may seem unfair on the firefighters that night but as Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigade Union said,

… we have alerted FBU members to the fact that the Inquiry will be a long and difficult process. We have said very clearly that we want to get to the truth of what happened and why. That means that the various parties are perfectly entitled to ask questions including difficult questions…

The disaster created a wound in the body politic, the knife has to cut cleanly without fear or favour.

Prologue

Mr and Mrs Alves lived on the thirteenth floor. They had been for an evening out with a cousin of Mrs Alves visiting from South Africa. Mr Alves worked as a chauffeur and Mrs Alves as a housekeeper. They were Portugese,

… Miguel and I dropped off my cousin and her daughter at the hotel. We drove back down Grenfell Road and then parked the car in the garage under Hurstway Walk. You needed a fob key to get into the garage… …the doors were often not working properly. As we were parking the car in the garage I said to Miguel I told you we weren't going to be in bed by one…

They took the lift (elevator). When the lift doors opened on the fourth floor to let someone in t was a light haze of smoke in the corridor and Mr Alves left the lift and ran up nine floors to wake their children. Mrs Alves went back down to the lobby to get her husband’s phone from the car. Thru the main glass doors she saw firefighters unable to get in. Mrs Alves let them in with her electronic fob and then went outside,

… there was a man with his wife and two toddlers coming out. The kids seemed to be cold and shivering. They went round to the other side entrance and sat on a concrete stool. This is on the East side of the Tower where you can see the boxing gym. I could see how cold the kids were, I decided to go back to the car to get some warm clothes for them as I had a box of clothes that I had collected for the refugees in Calais. I knew how cold they were so I ran, grabbed a couple of cardigans, came back to where they were sat, and gave them to the girls…

Mr Alves was public spirited enough to bang on the doors of his neighbours on the thirteenth floor of Grenfell Tower. It was clear to him that they were in danger and should leave the Tower. Official advice was that residents should stay put in their flats since the building was designed to contain fire in the apartment of origin. Dr Barbara Lane, the consulting fire safety engineer to the Inquiry stated,

… one hundred and forty four people in total left the building before one thirty eight. At this time the stair is described as clear…

That left one hundred and fifty residents inside the building, many of them asleep as the fire took hold.

Part one: the beginning.

*1*

I wouldn't have known it aged five (nobody did) but Grenfell Tower would push up out of the maze of streets and stables lying just to the north of Henry Dickens Court a step or two away from our house on St Ann’s Road. The Queen Mum opened Henry Dickens Court in 1953. I know that because I saw her, my legs round my father's neck. Grenfell Tower and the two low-rise snaky arms to the south sit exactly where the prefabs with neat gardens were assembled after bombs fell on Treadgold Street during the Second World War.

At Fox School Campden Hill Road in the corridor that divided off the assembly hall from the classrooms they put a poster colour painting of mine up on the wall. In the foreground travelling from right to left was a fire engine with a ladder on its back. In the background up towards the right was a little house on fire. People said the fire engine was going away from the fire. I said, ah yes, but you don't know where the road goes after the picture edge…

Another picture sometime later. Across from best friend Smiffy's council flat on Ladbroke Grove is North Kensington Fire Station. In a wintry afternoon gas fire fug Smiffy and I are head nodding Lisa's offer to show us her breasts. Rose coral points pop out from her blouse and right then the glare of a headlight hits the window and I turn to see the red rear end of a fire engine swing down the Grove spilling water from the indicator tube. North Ken have gone a-hunting.

Nothing happened about fire for a long time until one day working a holiday in Holland Park as a leaf sweeper I saw smoke rising round about the big mansion called Holland House. The smoke was pluming straight up from the woods to the north up near the pond. I got to the fence with my witches broom and climbed over. At the foot of a tree was one of those tailors' dummies - I think they called them mannequins - pink and smoking. The tree itself was alight so I set too beating out the fire. As I did so my eyes flicked over the dummy and caught toenails and frizzled genitalia. It came gently to me that this was a real person burnt plastic smooth. The fragile suicide turned out to be twenty-four years old, best friend of writer Redmond O'Hanlon. He had used petrol siphoned from the tank of his Vincent motorbike. Two detectives from Kensington nick wearing pricey suits vaulted the fence and took me in charge. By the side of the young man they found a notebook in which some of the names were known to me. At the inquest I gripped the dock, as they say, and gave evidence of discovery. The following week I found a complete set of discarded male clothes under a bush down towards the children's adventure park but there wasn't a body and there wasn't a fire.

Ten years go by. I have been on Red Watch at Halifax Fire Station West Yorkshire for a matter of a month or so. Just after change of shift one morning we get a call to a block of flats. Persons reported as the delightfully flat language has it. My second shout as an operational breathing apparatus wearer (BA). My partner in the back of the V8 Dennis is Chobbles Thurlow a near Steve McQueen ladies man and part time window cleaner. We storm down Skircoat Moor Road swing out onto Huddersfield Road and left again to a seven storey block. It was that quick. A woman in a housecoat meets us saying she'd smelt smoke and couldn't get an answer. Was it the fourth floor? Chobbles and I break the door and go into dense smoke just as we are without water. I will have gone into the curious motion used for searching blind feet swinging as wide as possible hands windmilling shouldering open doors. Now I'm coming into a tunnel of heat with a centre. Exploring the floor on my hands and knees hitting something, a corner a bed and then I put a hand out and burn myself on something I know straight away is human. I must have forgotten my gloves. I will have shouted into my mask for Chobbles. I was grappling mentally with whatever I might have to do when the smoke began to lift and so did my rescue. She came off her back in a jerky rise eyes shut straggly hair. A long psssst came from her mouth then she fell back. The smoke cleared from the four or five of us round the bed including Divisional Officer Rocky Mountain in the shiny riding boots he'd smuggled thru from the old Halifax City Brigade. I don't remember any first-aid rites. Old woman smoking in bed the smoke built up all night taking her with it, the air we let in raised the temperature enough for her to spasm and give me the fright of my life. We went back to the Station and had the chicken dinner.

Another ten years go by. Todmorden Fire Station close up to the Lancashire border is very quiet. Junior officers like me come and go. The snores and farts drive me out of the dormitory to sleep on the bench in the back of the turntable ladder. At five o'clock on a December morning in 1984 the tannoy gives: Train fire Summit Tunnel. Petrol tanks involved. Oh really? I lift my head from the leather cushion as the fluorescents switched from Control buzz and flash up. The Yorkshire mouth of Summit Tunnel is just a mile from the Station and within four minutes of being asleep we are walking into the tunnel carrying fire extinguishers. Far far in there is an orange blob doing the dance of the seven veils. We must have walked half a mile to get up to where petrol tank wagons stood in the tunnel like elephants with the fire chewing calmly thru their wooden under parts. By that time extinguishers felt stupid and naturally the radios weren't working. Up close at head height the tanks were very big and their metal walls were straining and groaning in the heat. Further down the tunnel a tank was on its side with proper angry flames starting to lick up. The smoke was coming down a bit now and only some of us wore breathing apparatus. The foam lines reached us and we worked like billy-o dragging the hoses down the sides of the tanks. We got about seven cars down when there was a whoosh and a roar and the tunnel roof lit up like day. All the tanks were flexing and creaking in the heat and big flames was rushing along the brick ceiling of the tunnel to find the air shaft that cut a hundred feet up thru the hillside. I heard the evacuation whistle. That was a new one for me. We dropped our gear and began the long walk out. We'd only been out a few minutes when the whole thing went up. Curled round a pint in a pub that evening I saw it on the telly, fifty foot plumes of flame and smoke from the air shafts. I thought that's my close call I'm not fit for another. Within a month I'd finished.

Just a couple of years later on a train from Hull to Todmorden for a misty autumn wedding I heard a voice inviting passengers to descend from the train owing to fire. People fussed around one of the carriages and I stood back at the end of the train and waited. And sure enough out of the mist walking along the track came Red Watch. As they passed me some of them nodded. Some of them I didn't know but most of them I did: Stuart Bradley who hated my southern accent, a temperamental mess manager fluttering over his saucepans like an old hen. Chris Binns the ex-submariner who had to be wheelbarrowed back home when he got too drunk in the Station bar (yes we had a bar in those days for sober half pints, Station Officer Gill on a stool primly sipping the one gin). Ex Guardsman Baz Davidson still twitching from Belfast with a super fast surreal wit that had us all cackling. Enigmatic Garth with his toff's accent and string of fancy women. Nick something or other building a second career racing motorbikes. Knocker Knowles with the Sub's bars he could have had years before if he hadn't preferred laughter and freedom. And Old Peelie, Gordon Peel the last of the smoke-eaters bald headed grizzled permanent turntable ladder. To name a few.

I never had a nickname I knew of although on my first shift someone asked me very politely if I was homosexual so I can guess what it might have been. That and the way I played volleyball. They thought I was on drugs.

I think it was that procession in the mist on Halifax railway station platform that led me to pass a summer and autumn viewing the Grenfell Tower Public Inquiry. I wanted to see if I could find my Red Watch thru the ungendered racially neutral prism of a service that no longer took its management style from the Navy but more from say… Marks & Spencer?

red watch Halifax circa 1978 charity pub crawl

*2*

The Queen feels a rip, bends down to inspect her hem and sees tiny figures scurrying about doing their jobs. She orders an Inquiry when something goes badly wrong and is too big to be smoothed over. She asks the State to look closely at what the underlings think they are doing for a light to be shone on parts normally covered or obscured. Mr Friedman QC appearing for the bereaved survivors and residents quoted from the Act of Parliament,

… an event, in the words of the statute, as to make a minister conclude that an independent process of fact-finding and recommendations is the only viable means to restore public confidence…

The Inquiry was commanded to scrutinise firstly what happened on the night of the fire and secondly what went wrong. As I join the Inquiry via Youtube, Counsel to the Inquiry Richard Millett QC is establishing his credentials to tackle those responsible for the disaster by being unsparing with London Fire Brigade witnesses.

The Chairman, Sir Martin Moore-Bick shuffles the lustrous folds of his suit and his pink and white oval goes … and now Mr Millett, who is your next witness… and I stand on Halifax platform by my stopped train and wait the next face out of the mist. Who will it be?

The owlish Mr Millett with his autistic (in a good way) questions grows patently into his brief day by day. Too much risks being made of the astonishment of highly paid lawyers at the conditions of everyday life and the behaviour of ordinary people. Phrases like … and on the stairwell did you discuss… show the gap.

Establishing a time line for what happened that night is vital for the Inquiry. But time stretches when there is an abnormal rate of sensory input. Timings from individual witnesses are being carefully locked into sequence tho as one firefighter said with a dry smile … there wasn't a big clock. The firefighters struggled that night in a bad dream that was slow paced against the speed of the fire (quickly beyond their reach) and against the size of the life risk within the Tower.

In the early days of the Inquiry Mr Millett's tact in dealing with witnesses is not yet as sure footed as it will become. He risks a humorous aside after a passage about the technicalities of fireground radios,

… WM O'Keefe: You're not a firefighter, so you wouldn't know...

Mr Millett: No, no. Not yet!

The expression on Watch Manager O'Keefe's battered Irish face if it could have been transcribed would have been … you'll never know the half of it chum… or …not on my watch old son… With the noise level on the fireground the face becomes an organ of communication. The periods of watch duty isolated as a group face to face around the mess table is a period of training, of learning the other by their gestures their way of moving their facial expressions so that on the fireground movement can be swift and subtly coordinated. On the fireground firefighters are self-motivated free radicals whose object is to rescue life and defeat fire linking wordlessly into various combinations for the time it takes to do a task.

To keep the balance around the mess table there is subtlety too. Firefighter Keane from Paddington gave an example during his soft-core interrogation by Mr Millett’s junior Mr Kinnier QC. Keane was being questioned about the weight of a light portable pump (actually a car engine in a tubular metal cage),

FF Keane: I believe it's eighty four kilos.

Mr Kinnier: So would you be able to carry it on your own or would you need help?

FF Keane: No, you're not allowed to for health and safety reasons.

Mr Kinnier: How many men would usually...

FF Keane: (interrupts) Four persons, not four men!

There was a suppressed titter in the room at Keane’s correction, a surprise from this tattoed-down-to-the-wrists firefighter if we hadn’t already recognised his intelligence. He deftly restores the balance round the mess table with,

FF Keane: Sorry!

Mr Kinnier: How many men or women?

FF Keane: Four.

Watching these first witnesses to the Inquiry some things were familiar to me from my service but some were not. The modern firefighter who may attend fewer incidents is physically fitter than we were. The words of Firefighter Bettinson … I am usually in early as I use the gym first… would have been foreign to Red Watch Halifax.

On the 28th June Mr Millett calls Firefighter Brown to take the stand. Brown had entered flat 16 on the fourth floor to put the fire out with Crew Manager Batterbee. You might say Brown is a child of fire or formed by fire. He joined at twenty and went straight to North Kensington from training school at Southwark. On the night of the fire he has been there twenty seven years. He has his heart in the job. Questioned about earlier inspection visits to Grenfell Tower he can’t stifle a riff,

…then... it wasn't just a familiarisation visit … what it was a fire safety enforcement visit to ensure that the building was meeting its fire regulations and to make sure that the fire systems in place are there, and not just making sure they're there, but we'd test them, we'd look at them, we'd physically -- we would test everything… you'd arrive, you'd look for the hydrant, you'd make sure that the access -- if there was a fire gate, you'd make sure that that was clear, you'd make sure if there's yellow lines which is a keep clear, you'd make sure that no one parked on there and if there was, you'd go to the concierge and say, sort that out, do not let people park there.

Then you'd go to the fire lifts, you'd make sure they had the fire lifts in place. You'd make sure it works. You didn't just look at it and say, there's a fire lift you'd then check this fire lift. It's part of the fire safety enforcement. You'd actually physically put the key in and operate the fire lift and see that it would work. You'd then go up to the top floor, you'd look at emergency lighting, you'd look at fire doors, you'd make sure the self-closures were there. And not only would you make sure the self-closures were there, you'd test the self-closures worked.

Millett: It sounds as if, from that answer, this is something you would do in the distant past but didn't do anymore?

FF Brown: We don't do it anymore because it's all been taken away, it's all been privatised. It's no longer our responsibility to make sure that these fire enforcements and fire certificates and fire safety things in place -- it's not our business anymore, apparently; it's all been privatised.

Millett: Okay. We're perhaps straying away from some factual questions…

O'Beirne we’d heard about from the start of the Inquiry scampering about high up in the Tower. Free radical. Curiosity. He got as far as the twelfth floor. Likewise Bedillo who got caught into a freelance operation and broke the rules. He got up to