When things go wrong, those in power often promise to make it right. But do they? In this series, The Times is going back to the scene of major news events to see if those promises were kept.

LONDON — When fire broke out at Grenfell Tower in London, the flames were whisked through the 24-story structure with astonishing speed, killing 72 people in Britain’s deadliest housing fire since World War II.

Outrage spread quickly when Britons learned the cheap cladding that shrouded the tower had turned it into a death trap. Prime Minister Theresa May vowed to an enraged nation that “no stone will be left unturned” to make sure the disaster never repeated itself.

Nearly two years after the Grenfell fire in June 2017, this is what we found of the government’s efforts, which have left tens of thousands of people at risk:

About 16,000 private apartments are still wrapped in the kind of exterior cladding that fed the Grenfell fire.

Their owners feel trapped in tinderboxes they cannot sell, and some residents have felt compelled to join round-the-clock patrols of their buildings, always on guard for a spark or whiff of smoke.

The government did move fairly quickly to strip the dangerous cladding from public housing towers, but people in approximately 8,400 public apartments await a full repair.

Many of the business-friendly regulations that allowed Grenfell to be built on the cheap remain in place, despite a promise to rethink them top to bottom.

The government has been slow to look at other types of flammable coverings that may be putting at least 340 additional apartment towers in danger .

The Problem

Dangerous Cladding and Deregulation

A year before the fire, contractors re-clad Grenfell Tower with a form of low-cost aluminum paneling . The cladding was banned in the United States and many European countries because if a fire breaks out, it allows the flames to spread quickly.

But English building rules were more lenient. As long as the cladding’s surface — the aluminum — was nonflammable, it mattered less what was inside. In this case, that meant a middle layer of plastic that amounted to a sheet of solidified fuel.