LONDON—The doorbell woke Yassin Adam just before 1 a.m. A neighbour was frantically alerting others on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower about a fire in his apartment. “My fridge blew up,” the man shouted.

Residents of Grenfell Tower had complained for years that the 24-story public housing block invited catastrophe. It lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. It had only a single staircase. And there were concerns about a new aluminum facade that was supposed to improve the building — but was now whisking the flames skyward.

The facade, Adam said, “burned like a fire that you pour petrol on.”

The incineration of Grenfell Tower on June 14, the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century, is a national tragedy. London’s Metropolitan Police Friday blamed flammable materials used in the facade for the spread of the blaze and said the investigation could bring charges of manslaughter.

At least 79 people died, a toll that is expected to rise as more bodies are recovered. A formal government inquiry into the fire has just begun.

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The facade at Grenfell Tower, installed last year in panels known as cladding and sold as Reynobond PE, consisted of two sheets of aluminum that sandwich a combustible core of polyethylene. It was produced by the U.S. manufacturing giant Alcoa, which was renamed Arconic after a reorganization last year.

Arconic has marketed the flammable facades in Britain for years, even as it has adjusted its pitch elsewhere. In other European countries, Arconic’s sales materials explicitly instructed that “as soon as the building is higher than the firefighters’ ladders, it has to be conceived with an incombustible material.” An Arconic website for British customers said only that such use “depends on local building codes.”

Adam, 44, had seen posters telling tenants to shut their doors and stay inside in the event of a fire. But Adam, his wife, his daughter and his pregnant sister ignored the instructions and ran.

“Anyone who listened to the fire brigade and stayed where they are,” Adam said in an interview the next day, “they lost their lives.”

‘How Is That Possible?’

The first call to the London Fire Brigade came at 12:45 a.m., according to an official statement. Six minutes later, as the first firefighters reached the scene, brigade veterans struggled to fathom the speed of the blaze.

“How is that possible?” one firefighter exclaimed, his astonishment captured in a video shot inside his vehicle as it sped toward the building.

“It has jumped all the way along the flats — look!”

How “are we going to get into that?” another asked, using an expletive.

Flames in an ordinary fire burst out of windows, moving from the inside out. Grenfell Tower burned in reverse, moving inward from the building’s exterior. The flames quickly tore upward in streaks through the facade, filling apartments with toxic black smoke and encasing the building in a cylinder of fire.

Built in 1974, the original concrete structure, built without cladding, was designed to contain a fire in one apartment long enough for firefighters to prevent it from spreading very far. But refrigerators in most apartments appear to have been positioned against an exterior wall, next to a window and just a few inches from the cladding installed in the renovation.

When the refrigerator on the fourth floor burst into flames, the fire ignited the flammable cladding and shot up the side of the building.

U.S. regulators by 1998 began requiring real-world simulations to test any materials to be used in buildings taller than a firefighter’s two-story ladder. “The U.S. codes say you have to test your assembly exactly the way you install it in a building,” said Robert Solomon, an engineer at the National Fire Protection Association, which is funded in part by insurance companies and drafts model codes followed in the United States and around the world.

No aluminum cladding made with pure polyethylene has ever passed the test, experts in the United States say. As a result, U.S. building codes have effectively banned flammable cladding in highrises for nearly two decades. And partly because of the influence of U.S. architects, many territories around the world follow the U.S. example. But not Britain.

Safety vs. Cost

The legacy of the Great Fire of London, in 1666, is still felt in Britain’s building codes, experts say. The codes have focused primarily on the principle of stopping the spread of flames between buildings or, within larger structures, between units.

But as early as 1999, after a fire in Irvine, Scotland, British fire safety engineers warned Parliament that the advent of flammable cladding had opened a dangerous loophole in the regulations. The Irvine fire saw flames leap up panels at Garnock Court, a 14-story public housing block. One resident died, four others were injured and a Parliamentary committee investigated the causes.

“To a certain extent, we are hoisted by the petard of what happened here in 1666, the Great Fire of London, and we look at fire as a horizontal problem, with a fire in one building affecting the exterior of another building,” Glynton Evans, a fire safety adviser to the firefighters’ union, said to Parliament. “The problem with cladding is that it will, if it is able, spread fire, and it will spread it vertically.”

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The firefighters and engineers warned Parliament that British codes required only that the aluminum used in cladding resist ignition, even though the heat of a fire would breach the surface and expose the flammable material inside. Nor did the British rules require a test to evaluate risks in real-world conditions.

But manufacturers argued against new tests or rules. Using fire-resistant materials was more expensive, a cost that industry advocates opposed.

Business-friendly governments in Britain — first under Labour and then under the Conservatives — campaigned to pare back regulations. A 2005 law known as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order ended a requirement for government inspectors to certify that buildings had met fire codes, and shifted instead to a system of self-policing. Governments adopted slogans calling for the elimination of at least one regulation for each new one that was imposed, and the authorities in charge of fire safety took this to heart.

“If you think more fire protection would be good for U.K. business, then you should be making the case to the business community, not the government,” Brian Martin, the top civil servant in charge of drafting building-safety guidelines, told an industry conference in 2011, quoting the fire minister then, Bob Neill. (“Should we be looking to regulate further? ‘No’ would be my answer,’” Neill added.)

Two years later, in 2013, Martin defended the existing regulations. Moving to a requirement that the exterior of a building be “noncombustible,” Martin said, “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”

In 2014, the Fire Protection Research Foundation, an organization in the United States, counted 20 major highrise fires involving cladding. In at least a half-dozen, the same type of panels installed at Grenfell Tower caught fire. A 2014 fire in Melbourne, Australia, resulted in multiple investigations into the dangers of combustible cladding. Another fire broke out in Dubai, around a 60-story skyscraper, on New Year’s Eve 2015, and yet another, around a 70-story skyscraper there, in April.

But in Britain, still no changes were made.

‘Pray for Us’

Hassan Ibrahim, who lived on the 23rd floor of Grenfell Tower, was travelling outside England the day of the fire. His wife, Rania, and their two small children were not so lucky. As the smoke and flames sped upward, Rania Ibrahim debated with a neighbour whether to risk opening her door.

“Don’t open the front door,” her neighbour told her. “You are not going to be able to breathe — you are just going to bring the smoke in. You have your children. Standing near the door with all the smoke is not going to help you.”

“Maybe someone outside?” Ibrahim asked plaintively.

For a moment, she threw the door open. “Hello! Hello! Come here,” she shouted into the blackened hallway. Then she gave up and retreated. “OK, OK, I closed it,” she said. “I am not going to go.”

Ibrahim recorded a video as she fretted over what to do — and then posted it online as the fire was still raging.

The fire service said it received 600 calls from the building that night, some lasting an hour. Speaking in Arabic over a telephone, Ibrahim said: “We are on the last floor. The last floor is the one that has not caught fire yet.”

Then, a few moments later, she said: “It’s over. It is here.”

“Pray for us,” she added.

Her husband arrived at the charred hulk of the building the next day. His wife and children are still listed among the missing.