Those images from the early hours of Wednesday – fire shooting up the side of a tower block, with desperate people trapped inside it – were what I have been fearing for seven years.
In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks.
In their original form, tower blocks are stacks of concrete boxes, insulated from each other. If a fire breaks out in one flat, it will be contained so long as the fire doors remain closed – that is why the advice for other residents is to stay put in their flats and place wet towels under the doors to stop the smoke.
By the turn of the millennium, the post-war tower blocks that are scattered through Britain’s cities had become rundown and ugly.
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