The Grenfell fire was an unimaginable horror

The burning tower was like a war zone. Flaming panels rained down on firefighters and people trying to escape. Windows exploded and the corridors were filled with poisonous smoke that could overwhelm people in minutes. Bodies of the dead and dying lay across the single stairway that provided the only hope for escape. Two people fell from the building, possibly having jumped. When a firefighter tried to move one body, its leg came off. Families and friends huddled in flats with wet towels against doors in the hope that the flames and smoke would not reach them, but they were engulfed, in some cases dying while on the telephone to loved ones.

The building after its 2016 refurbishment was a ‘death trap’

It took just 25 minutes for the flames to rise 20 storeys to the top of the tower, fuelled by plastic-filled cladding that burned like petrol. Fire breaks between floors were missing, creating a chimney effect. There was a culture of non-compliance, found the inquiry’s fire expert, Barbara Lane. Neither the design and construction team nor the council’s building control department appear to have known how the system would perform in a fire. Smoke killed most of the 72 people who died. The smoke ventilation system had broken down days earlier, and a proposal to fix the system for £1,800 was ignored. Fire doors were not fire safety compliant, and a decorative “crown” of combustible cladding panels at the top of the building acted like a “fuse”, spreading the fire around all sides.

The London fire brigade’s lack of readiness may have cost lives

Radio systems collapsed, so information about trapped people was transmitted on scraps of paper. There were not enough breathing apparatus kits, and no one had been trained in tackling cladding fires despite the risk being raised internally. The LFB admitted it was “overwhelmed”, but the commissioner, Dany Cotton, said there had been no point in organising training for such a fire, which she compared to “the space shuttle landing on the Shard”.

One survivors’ group said the LFB retained a “cultural inability to plan for a major disaster in any high-rise block”. The building owners had a stay-put policy in place in event of fire. This effectively failed at 1.23am, according to Lane, yet the LFB kept the policy in place until 2.37am, when 107 people were still inside. Only 36 got out.

Individual firefighters were brave and saved lives, breaking into flats without any water to protect themselves and ascending the first few floors of the building without breathing apparatus to save air. One firefighter, Christopher Batcheldor, told how he stayed on the phone with Zainab Deen and her toddler Jeremiah, who were trapped on the 14th floor as the fire reached them, eventually hearing her “ear-splitting” screams as she died. His colleague Christopher Secrett, thinking he was about to die, placed himself in a corner of the smoke-logged stairs so his body would not be in the way of people escaping. He survived.

The corporate participants are in defensive mode

Arconic, which made the combustible cladding panels, said they were “at most a contributing feature to the fire”. If the windows had been built differently, it said, “the fire service might well have been able to extinguish the fire” in flat 16, where the disaster began. Whirlpool, which made the Hotpoint fridge-freezer considered responsible for the fire’s ignition, claimed the fire could have been sparked by a lit cigarette rather than an electrical fault. This was dismissed as “desperate” by the counsel for Behailu Kebede, who lived in the flat.

Almost three years before the fire, Ed Daffarn, a resident on the 16th floor, requested to see the tenant management organisation’s monthly minutes about the refurbishment project, including input from the contractor Rydon and the architect Studio E. The freedom of information request was refused because release might “prejudice the commercial interests of the contractor”. Those minutes are likely to make up some of the 200,000 documents about planning and construction expected to be disclosed as part of the second phase of the inquiry.

Survivors and firefighters are struggling with trauma

Post-traumatic stress disorder, memory loss, depression and anxiety are just some of the problems people who witnessed the fire now face. Farhad Neda, 25, who carried his disabled mother down the stairs from the 23rd floor and lost his father, told the inquiry: “I can still hear the sounds of people desperately struggling to breathe.” In October he said he felt “very lost” and had yet to grieve properly.

Tiago Alves, who escaped with his family, said they were “still suffering from the trauma of what we witnessed. The fire has had a horrific impact on my life. I cannot seem to settle and move on.”

Firefighters are struggling, too. Cotton said she had experienced memory loss linked to trauma. “I’m still finding it very difficult to look at visual images and have conversations about Grenfell,” she said.