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Hello and welcome to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with me, Kate Lamble.

This week, the inquiry heard from expert witnesses as they commented on the preparation of the London Fire Brigade.

One of those witnesses told the inquiry the London Fire Brigade's failure to understand the consequences of the loss

of compartmentation in a building fire showed, quote, incompetence at all levels.

Let's get started with the evidence then. Jose Torero is a fire safety expert and a professor

of civil engineering at University College London. He first gave evidence to the inquiry back

in 2018 when he commented

on how the cladding installed on the outside of Grenfell contributed to the spread of the fire.

You can hear that evidence in episode 95 of this podcast. This time round, though, he's been asked

to look at the London Fire Brigade's policies and training. And one central question about the LFB's response

on the night of the Grenfell Tower fire is why firefighters on the ground didn't order residents

to get out of the building until 247 in the morning, an hour and 20 minutes after the fire

reached the roof of the tower. In his phase one report, the chair of the inquiry, Sir Martin Morebic,

found that firefighters treated the stay-put strategy, the idea that residents should be safe

to remain in their flats unless they were directly affected by fire, heat or smoke, as an

article of faith. Before Grenfell, only a small percentage of fires required evacuations. From 8,000 fires in blocks of flats over the past 20 years, there had only been 22 evacuations of more than five people. Jose Torero called that statistically insignificant.

Fire brigades made decisions on how to train their staff based on data like this.

It's not only the fire brigades. We design the documents that we use, the policies that we implement.

Everything is backed by the fact it's not going to happen to me.

But, Jose Terreru argues, the numbers don't necessarily tell the whole story.

You might have been in many very near misses, and those don't get recorded.

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