to ask if Grenfell residents could have been evacuated

[why100000]

had the fire brigade not blindly followed the “stay put” policy.

Am watching the documentary on Channel 4 at the moment.

Unbearable .

Stop blaming the brave firefighters who tried their very best and lost their lives in the Grenfell fire. They were inadequately prepared for a fire of this magnitude. The blame lays squarely on the contractors of this cladding, and the Council who wanted to save money, by employing the cheapest and not the best. The local council officials who decided to cost cut, and not install sprinklers.

How were they to know the building had been covered in super flammable materials?

Not at first, no. But as the fire was quickly spreading up the building, it became blatantly obvious - roughly 1.30. It was over an hour later when they finally decided to start telling people to get out. That was an hour when they knew the building fire couldn't be stopped (as confirmed by a number of fire officers during the enquiry), but were still telling those inside to stay put. It was a catastrophic failure of command and control.

And for those who've not watched it, but still feel able to condemn it's contents (!), it wasn't blaming individual fire fighters - it was blaming the system itself, i.e. poor training, failure to learn from previous incidents, etc. In fact it was at pains not to criticise individual firefighters.

It really isnt about blame. No individual firefighter is going to be prosecuted for manslaughter here,or are they? Could a Gold commander be prosecuted?

No,its about a cold assessment of what went wrong,learning from it and preventing a repeat.

You dont have to be an experienced FF to look at a tower block and realise that the flames have escaped the containment zone and are ripping up the side of the block and will eventually envelope the building and we have no control of it so everyone must leave ASAP.

No,its about a cold assessment of what went wrong,learning from it and preventing a repeat.

Exactly. Unfortunately, the fire commissioners remarks, basically that they'd do nothing different if it happened again, are damning, especially after LFB didn't act fully on the Coroner's recommendations of the Lakanal House fire a few years earlier (again, breached compartmentation but for different reasons). She gives the impression that they don't accept the need to learn from Grenfell.

At the end of the day, things DO happen that shouldn't and the emergency services should be trained to deal with the unexpected as more (if not moreso) than the expected.

One fact is that it took far too long for a senior officer to arrive at the scene, leaving a junior ranking officer to deal with a rapidly escalating situation that he had no training in and was therefore completely out of his depth and comfort zone - that's NOT a criticism of him, it's a criticism of LFB command and control. (The local senior officer didn't answer his pager as he thought he was off duty - control thought he was on duty!)

@Arnoldthecat

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3249197-Ronan-Point-50-years-on

grenfellactiongroup.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/dispatches-grenfell-action-group-reply/

www.fbu.org.uk/news/2019/02/20/government-%E2%80%9Csneaks-through%E2%80%9D-15-cut-fire-service#.XHHhtQJQARR.twitter

There is no evidence that austerity had any effect on LFB's actions at Grenfell. They got over 40 appliances and hundreds of firefighters there within a pretty good timescale. The turntable ladder COULD have been sent 15 minutes earlier, but it was sat in a station doing nothing, with it;s crew sat in a station doing nothing, until it was called for. Familiarisation visits were done on schedule, but the officers who attended didn't actually seem to do the checking required. The control units were full of high-tech equipment but little of it actually worked. Having listened and watched most of the public enquiry to date, I've not heard anything at all to suggest that lack of funds or austerity had any effect at all - certainly none of the people giving evidence have given any concrete evidence of lack of funds playing any part.

How were they to know the building had been covered in super flammable materials?

Actually, they did know. The LFB circulated a warning paper about cladding and its potential flammability some years before Grenfell. As with everything where big money is concerned, there are those who wanted to play down this fact, and still do following Grenfell.

Perhaps more to the point is that the fire services, FBU, etc, have known for years that upholstered furniture contains huge amounts of flame retardant chemicals that are extremely toxic when they burn. And they'd known for at least three years before Grenfell that the fire regulations governing such furniture do not work, i.e. the tower was packed with huge volumes of flammable, toxic material. This was a far bigger risk than cladding and, as said, definitely known about. Why 'Stat Put'? Well, perhaps one day Mr Dave Sibert of the FBU will be questioned about this. And about what he thinks of the fact that high-ranking officials in the fire sector receive a lot of money from the flame retardant industry for supporting their products.

www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/clyde-house-residents-death-trap-14070046