The fire started in the kitchen of flat 16 on the fourth floor. Within three hours, it had spread around the whole perimeter of Grenfell Tower, the inquiry has heard.



Bahailu Kebede was woken by the sound of his smoke alarm. Going into his kitchen he saw smoke in the area of the tall fridge freezer by the window.



He woke the two other occupants in the two-bedroomed flat and dialled “999” on his mobile. “I call straight away, ‘please, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire,’” he said in a statement. He alerted other residents on the fourth floor and, as he fled his flat, he switched off the electricity supply at the fuse box by the door, the inquiry heard.



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“On the basis of the available evidence, it is more likely than not that the area of origin of the fire was in or around the tall fridge freezer in the southeast part of the kitchen,” Prof Niamh Nic Daéid, a fire and forensic investigations expert based at Dundee University, said in a report to the inquiry.



The exact cause remains undetermined, she said. The area of origin also included a space between the fridge freezer and window that had contained materials that were currently unknown.



Four fire engines were initially dispatched. The first two firefighters at the scene broke down the door and “black smoke billowed out”. The fire appeared to be in the top left corner of the kitchen, described by one firefighter as “an isolated curtain of flame from about two to three feet in the air to the ceiling”.



Images taken on their thermal imaging camera appeared to show falling embers outside the window. Another firefighter, John O’Hanlon, said in a statement: “You wouldn’t recognise it as a fridge, just a charred rectangle with a bit of melted stuff at the bottom that was still alight.”



“The window had gone by then, broken … that’s when we noticed that the window had completely gone. Even the frame wasn’t there and we noticed that it was on fire, that the window surround was on fire.



“We walked over to the window and started spraying the window frame. It didn’t have any effect on it, at which point I sat on the window sill and was leaning out and trying to hit what I thought was the window surround”.



In total, the time between the firefighters first opening the door of flat 16 and their final entry into the kitchen, which resulted in them extinguishing the fire within the kitchen, was estimated to be 11 minutes and 35 seconds, according to Daéid’s report.



There are four stages to major fires such as this, Prof Jose Torero of the University of Maryland, said. In Grenfell Tower, the first had been this “relatively minor” local fire. But this fire had compromised the uPVC window fittings. It had ignited one of the flammable components of the cladding.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grenfell Tower at 1.26am, 14 June. Photograph: AP

This was the second phase, the jump from the kitchen through the window to the cladding. It was likely to have happened before the first firefighters even entered flat 16. From that moment on, London Fire Brigade’s stay put strategy was compromised, said Torero.



Once it had established on the outside of the facade system, “fire spread up the facade was inevitable”, he said. Even though evacuation – or egress – was “not free of risk” at this stage it was still a better strategy than “stay put”, he said in his expert report. The structural integrity of the building would not be in question at this stage.



The fire was observed to have spread to the cladding by 01.09. It then spread vertically upwards on the east face of Grenfell Tower. It took just 20 minutes for the fire to spread from the fourth floor to the roof.



The vertical spread had started slowly, but accelerated as the fire grew in size, said Prof Luke Bisby of the University of Edinburgh’s school of engineering. By 01.36 it had spread laterally on to the north face, then it went southwards on the east face. This lateral fire spread initially occurred mostly at the top of the building.



Smoke and heat had reached the stairwell early on in the fire, probably aided by occupant and firefighter movements, Torero said. This had impeded escape in the regions around floor 12 and above floor 20. There was “generalised untenable conditions” throughout the tower by approximately 01.50 to 02.30. By this point, he said, firefighters’ operations were “outside the bounds of conventional practice”. This was the third stage.



By 02.49 the fire had spread from the north face to the west face. The cladding at the south-west corner was the last part, and was consumed by fire coming from two directions, spreading southwards along the west face and westwards along the south face.



It took approximately three hours and four minutes for it to spread around the full perimeter. After this time, it continued to spread downwards and ingress into the building and burn within the building.



“Beyond this is the fourth stage, firefighting activities are governed by conditions in the building and performed in an ad-hoc manner,” said Torero. “There is considerable risk to those rescuing and being rescued.” However, egress or evacuation remains the “preferred option”, he said.



His report provided a breakdown of where victims were recovered. Most were discovered in their own flats. Others had tried, too late, to escape. There were 29 victims found in other parts of the tower. Nineteen victims had been able to reach the stairs, but went upwards rather then downwards. Three were found either in the stairs or in the adjacent lobby, suggesting they were attempting to travel down the stairs, he said.

