As a young man with a family to keep I did time in the Fire Service. I'm glad I did. Finding out some of my 100% effort limits, seeing some of the things I did has given me a standard to set things against.
During the night of the thirteenth of June 2017, the end of the Ramadan religious fast, a blaze took hold of a twenty three storey block in Notting Dale, West London called Grenfell Tower. The block was social housing, home to people of many countries. Grenfell Tower had recently undergone a major re-furbishment.
The fire started in a fridge freezer on the fourth floor then found its way out by the window linings into the insulation layer of the new external cladding. Within nineteen minutes it had raced to the top of the tower. The high temperature fires in the cladding then punched back thru into different floors, the smoke and toxic fumes overwhelmed and confused the automatic vent system. The one stairwell could not cope with residents trying to escape and firefighters trying to rescue them. By four o'clock that morning seventy two residents had lost their lives.
The block was built in the neighbourhood I grew up in. Seeing those streets, those people, I was transfixed. A friend from childhood traced me and said, "Man it just went up like a cardboard shoe box".
I decided to follow the official Inquiry as a way of entering into writing about the event. I limited myself to Part One of the Inquiry - that is to say the evidence of the technical experts, the evidence of the firefighters and other profesionals at the scene that night and the evidence of the bereaved, survivors and resiident
