Grenfell: Building a Disaster - Ep 2: Building Blocks

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast

BBC

News

4.8 • 627 Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2024

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How a fire in Scotland in 1999 foretold the fire at Grenfell Tower.

In 1999, a dropped cigarette started a tower block fire in a small town on the west coast of Scotland. The building, which had been recently clad in flammable materials, is said to have caught fire like matchwood. This was one of the first signs that combustible materials were being permitted in the building sector in the UK. These risks were even raised with the New Labour government – so why didn’t they act?

How did the UK’s regulations allow for such materials to be used on high rise buildings? And how did government deregulation in the 1980s shape attitudes to health and safety?

Presenter: Kate Lamble Producer: Josephine Casserly Production coordinator: Janet Staples Audio engineers: James Beard and Gareth Jones Story consultant: Simon Maybin Editor: Penny Murphy

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts.
0:05.6	I don't really talk about it out loud, so I don't know if I'm making any sense,
0:09.5	but it was just this absolute destruction.
0:13.4	Obviously, I've never seen anything like it.
0:16.8	In the months after the fire at Grenfell Tower,
0:19.7	experts were asked to go inside the 24-storey West London Tower block
0:23.7	to help piece together what went wrong.
0:25.9	The darkness, black smoke-staining everywhere,
0:31.2	partially destroyed flats.
0:35.3	You'd walk into a flat, there would be no door, nothing left, rubble.
0:42.3	Dr Barbara Lane is a fire safety specialist with a company called Arup.
0:46.3	She's become one of the main expert witnesses to the public inquiry into the disaster.
0:51.3	You might go into another flat and one half might be burnt and you'd walk into a room
0:57.2	and there would be a cot. I have a particular memory of a cot and that bedroom almost perfect in a way
1:05.0	and then you step outside to absolute horror. The humanity of it I think, you know, yeah, the humans, what
1:15.0	the humans went through, absolutely utterly and totally appalling.
1:19.1	This is the story of a fire which killed 72 people, a fire both foreseeable and preventable,
1:30.4	and what it tells us about the people and policies meant to protect us.
1:35.3	I'm Kate Lamble from BBC Radio 4. This is Grenfell, building a disaster.
1:43.9	Episode 2, Building Blocks
1:48.2	As I've reported from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry,
1:51.3	I've spent days listening to Barbara Lane give detailed evidence.
	...

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