Five years ago, today, a fire broke out in the early hours in a tower block in West London.

The fire at Grenfell should have been contained on the floor where it started, but within minutes

it spread with such speed and ferocity that the entire block of flats was turned into a towering inferno.

It became the deadliest residential fire in the UK since World War II.

72 people were killed.

Beneath a still moon, a blaze of such ferocity, it is almost filmic.

A vision as near as a hellos could be imagined as the flames saw through 24 floors and gulp think all in their path.

Five years on and a public inquiry is still trying to establish what went wrong that night.

But the evidence it's heard has already exposed a housing scandal that could place many more lives at risk.

640,000 including many children are still living in flats today that can burn at any moment that are wrapped in flammable materials.

You're listening to stories of our times from the times and the Sunday times.

I'm Manvin Rana.

Today, the Grenfell fire, five years on, the cladding scandal.

Yesterday, Martina Lees, the Sunday times senior property writer, described the horror of the night the fire broke out for three different families.

The Wahhabis from the ninth floor who managed to escape, their cousins on the 21st floor who couldn't, and the Belkardis who lived just below them.

The Belkardis family on the 20th floor all died except for their five-year-old daughter who alone survived.

She lost her mother, her father, her big sister Malak, who was eight, and her baby sister Lena, who was just six months.

Lena was found still gradled in her mother's arms on the stairs.

Next to Malak, and her father.

In the aftermath of the fire, protests erupted, calling for justice.

And the then Prime Minister Theresa May announced a public inquiry which began in September 2017.

Almost five years later, it's still ongoing.

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