Well time for some links I guess.
The Inquiry only sat for one day this week but it concluded the four days of evidence from Carl Stokes, the 'TMO's fire risk assessor.
Here's this week's Inside Housing Grenfell Diary (archived)
Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 37: ‘In giving that advice, weren’t you acting beyond your knowledge and expertise?’
Links from it should be working.
One of many issues that came up was Carl Stokes' response to a letter the London Fire Brigade sent all Councils in April 2017, following the outcome of the investigation into a fire the year before in Shepherd's Court, a tower block in Hammersmith & Fulham. (A different borough of course. Admittedly one that was part of the
tri-borough arrangement with Westminster and RBKC, but it would be unreasonable to expect that arrangement to facilitate any lessons learned without external prompting </sarcasm>)
The Grenfell Diary links to one of Inside Housing's articles about Shepherd's Court, but they also produced a detailed report about it in May 2017 just weeks before the fire at Grenfell.
A stark warning: the Shepherd's Bush tower block fire (archived)
Carl Stokes reassured the TMO twice in writing that the issues raised by the LFB didn't apply at Grenfell. In his evidence on Tuesday he attempted to justify this:
Carl Stokes: (…) this letter did not apply to Grenfell because it does not apply to cladding, this letter applied to spandrel panels and was site-specific to Shepherd’s Bush, and on the second page it says about the requirements of Building Regulations and the building control officer had signed off Grenfell Tower anyway.
In the strict sense, of course, the situation at Grenfell wasn't like that at Shepherd's Court. It was very much worse. As Kate Lamble points out in this weeks BBC podcast:
The panels involved in the Shepherd’s Court fire were made of wood and polystyrene foam covered in a thin sheet of steel. At Grenfell in addition to the polyethylene-filled cladding, and the combustible foam insulation packed around the edges of the windows, in between the windows there were also panels made from extruded polystyrene covered in a thin layer of aluminium.
Not that Carl Stokes knew one way or the other.
Here are the transcripts of
last week's and
this week's BBC podcasts. The second contains an interview with Peter Wilkinson of the Institution of Fire Engineers to set some of Stokes' testimony in context.
Inside Housing published a long report about the building safety risks associated with combustible window panels back in 2018.
Flammable window panels: the forgotten threat (archived).
Next week Janice Wray, the 'TMO's health and safety and facilities manager, who Carl Stokes reported to, is due to give evidence all week.
