Flammable cladding blamed for the rapid spread of the fatal Grenfell Tower blaze was pinpointed as contributing to another fire in a high-rise apartment building in Melbourne, which narrowly avoided loss of life.

A fire at the Lacrosse building in Melbourne’s Docklands on 25 November 2014 is strikingly similar to London’s Grenfell Tower fire, which has left at least 17 people dead and many more injured.



The rapid spread of the Lacrosse building fire, which was sparked by a cigarette on an eighth-floor balcony and raced up 13 floors to the roof of the 21-storey building in 11 minutes, was blamed on flammable aluminium composite cladding that lined the exterior concrete walls.

The same type of cladding was installed on the Grenfell Tower in 2016, as part of a £10m renovation.

Aluminium composite panels have a polyethylene or plastic core and an aluminium coating. It is a cheap building material widely used worldwide to clad high-rise apartment buildings.

A picture of the fire at the Lacrosse tower in Melbourne’s Docklands in 2014 which spread across the facade in a matter of minutes. Photograph: Gregory Badrock/Metropolitan Fire Brigade

There have been reports of fires involving aluminium cladding in residential towers in France, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea and the US.

In a report into the investigation of the Lacrosse fire, the Melbourne metropolitan fire brigade said the rapid vertical spread of the fire was “directly associated” with the external cladding.

“Had the external wall cladding been of a non-combustible type, the likelihood of fire spread beyond the level of ignition would have been greatly reduced,” it said.

David Youssef, the deputy chief fire officer for the MFB, said at the time: “Those of us that have been around for 30 years or more have never seen a fire develop in this way.

“We never expected to see a high-rise fire, particularly one in a new building, that would spread so quickly from the eighth floor to the 21st floor.”

Australia’s national science agency, the CSIRO, conducted tests on the cladding and found it was combustible and did not meet building codes.

Initial reports from the Grenfell fire suggest the gap between the cladding and the external walls of the building acted as a chimney, funnelling flames up the side of the building.

“[A fire] doesn’t travel up concrete, does it, so it’s got to have travelled up something and the cladding was there so prima facie the cladding has been the cause of the fire spreading up the external parts of the building,” fire safety expert Graham Fieldhouse said.

The Lacrosse fire prompted the Victorian Building Authority (VBA) to audit the cladding used on high-rise buildings in Melbourne, which prompted an update to the national building codes.

The use of dangerous building materials is also being examined by an Australian Senate committee, headed by senator Nick Xenophon.

“The evidence we heard at the inquiry from the Metropolitan fire brigade was chilling and disturbing,” Xenophon said on Thursday. “If our firefighters are saying that their jobs are being made extremely difficult from this inflammable cladding, we need to act with urgency.

“The fact that these products could still be on Australian buildings indicates the need for an urgent audit of all buildings and to look at how this cladding comes into the country in the first place.

Xenophon said the Grenfell Tower tragedy was a “serious wake-up call” to tighten compliance regimes around building materials.

In a later submission to the Victorian government, the MFB said there had been a “regulatory failure” around the use of flammable cladding, which could also have an economic impact. The cost of replacing the cladding for the Lacrosse building alone was estimated at $20m and the same cladding is found on “hundreds of buildings across the state”, the MFB said.

Of the 170 buildings audited by the VBA, a report published in 2016 found 85 used materials that were not compliant with Australian building codes, which require that external cladding minimise the risk of fire.

They included the Royal Women’s Hospital and the Comprehensive Cancer Centre, both of which were clad in aluminium composite panels.

The VBA chief executive, Prue Digby, said it was “a national issue”.

In an interview with the ABC following the Lacrosse fire, the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union national secretary, Michael O’Connor, said use of flammable aluminium cladding was “rife”.

“It’s used in buildings throughout Australia,” O’Connor said. “All the information we’re receiving, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne, every capital city, we believe this product is used in many buildings and particularly in high rise buildings.”

With the exception of the Harvest apartment building on Melbourne’s Southbank, which was issued with an emergency order, none of the non-compliant buildings were deemed unsafe by the VBA. Since the audit was published in February 2016, 44 have been made compliant.