Why disabled people will be forced to stay in burning high-rises

‘Grenfell is a story about a failed evacuation.’ These are the words of Professor Ed Galea, an internationally respected expert in fire safety and evacuations who, among other things, wrote a pivotal study into the attempted evacuation of the World Trade Centre on 9/11.

But this is something the British state, and particularly the Home Office, appears utterly unable to accept.

For decades, this country has relied on telling residents in burning tower blocks to ‘stay put’. This has been baked into the way we build our high rises: we require walls, floors and ceilings to effectively break the building up into a series of small, fire resisting boxes. This is a process known to fire engineers as ‘compartmentation’ and the aim is to hold a fire within a single box for long enough for it to be extinguished. As a result, there is no need for anyone in any of the other boxes to leave.