NEWS


during the course of the night, do you accept that the revocation of the “stay-put” advice should have happened at an earlier stage than it did?’ In response, Mr O’Loughlin stated: ‘I don’t think you could say that a decision could be taken earlier based on what I saw several hours later.’ The Guardian also reported on


Ms Cotton’s testimony, in which she stated that the fire was so unexpected that it was like ‘the space shuttle landing on the Shard’, though she conceded LFB had known about cladding fire risks beforehand. She also admitted she had


no knowledge of an internal presentation detailing cladding risks, and did not know about other cladding facade fires before Grenfell. The internal presentation had been prepared in October 2016 for LFB by its fire engineers, and was shared among safety officers when Ms Cotton was director of safety and assurance. She stated that she had not seen it, and that even since Grenfell had only ‘looked through it but I’ve not studied in detail’. In addition, she had no idea


why it had not been distributed to watch managers. Mr Millett asked if that did not ‘indicate a structural or cultural failure’ at LFB, to which she said she thought not, and he asked in turn whether Grenfell was ‘not the unexpected which you should be expecting’, to which Ms Cotton replied that ‘I wouldn’t develop a training package for a space shuttle landing on the Shard’. Insisting also that there was ‘no


way’ firefighters could have been expected to know if cladding was flammable, and that they would not have been able to extinguish it, her perspective was that it was ‘the responsibility of building inspectors, designers and builders to ensure that buildings performed as they should to allow firefighters to extinguish fires and rescue people’. But she admitted that she had not read government guidance from 2014 for fighting fires in high rises, which states that ‘combustible material in voids and cavities and poor quality of


construction can also contribute to the spread of fire and smoke beyond the compartment of origin’. Ms Cotton said she knew this,


and officers were trained to look for it, but that it would be ‘impossible to train officers to recognise poor quality construction’, even though the guidance says that information should be gathered on cladding. To this, she said she was unaware this was the case but that it was ‘almost impossible’ to see what was used unless it was obvious. She commented: ‘People will


quite rightly have questions, but for me I could not be more proud of the absolute commitment and dedication of the firefighters […] they did it. They went in there, they worked as hard as they could to rescue as many people as they could. The difficult bit now is about people levelling criticism at them, when they put their lives on the line.’ Having comforted firefighters


‘broken down in my arms’, she said that she had ‘never seen a situation on the fire ground where firefighters were openly crying and distressed’, and admitted that a ‘woefully inadequate’ amount of information about the building had been available on LFB’s database, seven years out of date prior to the 2016 refurbishment and featuring no tactical plan. Ms Cotton admitted this was


a failure, ‘but not a serious one’ as firefighters knew enough ‘to do our best to respond to a terrible situation that we should never have been placed in’, though the absence of detailed plans was a ‘serious failure’. That night, her role was monitoring officer providing support to the incident commander, and she could have taken command, but did not because she was ‘satisfied with the firefighting plan’. On compartmentation, Ms Cotton


‘had never experienced widespread compartmentation failure in a high- rise residential block’, and concluded: ‘I have had issues with my memory, which I believe is linked to the traumatic nature and sheer scale of the incident. I deliberately didn’t write


any notes at the time of the incident, because I had such poor recall of the night’s events and I’d hoped they would improve.


‘I’m still finding it very difficult


to look at visual images and have conversations about Grenfell. I’m still responsible for effectively running [LFB], and everything else that’s involved in that. It would be no good for me to fall apart.’ Huffington Post later reported on


the testimony of watch manager Dean Ricketts, who stated that the ‘complexities of the basement’ would have been a ‘suitable venue’ for a training exercise. This was planned for 8 June ‘less than a week before the deadly fire’, but was then cancelled as it clashed with another exercise to take place at HMP Wormwood Scrubs. Mr Ricketts, watch manager at


North Kensington fire station, stated when asked why the latter ‘took precedence’ that ‘you will have to ask the station manager who cancelled the exercise’. It had been prompted by a


familiarisation visit undertaken by Mr Ricketts and a North Kensington fire crew in March 2017, which aimed to ‘gather and check basic information’, and record it on LFB’s operational risk database (ORD) to create a tactical plan. Because of a ‘large number’ of residents entering and leaving at the time, the crew ‘were unable to test the controls of the fireman’s lifts’, and were ‘unable to locate’ a premises information box. This would have contained


‘useful’ information such as floor plans, evacuation strategies and procedures, as well as instructions for the mechanical ventilation systems. Mr Ricketts recorded on the ORD the ‘absence of the premises information box’ within the lobby, and noted concerns about restricted access for appliances and emergency vehicles ‘in the immediate area’. He reported having ‘absolutely


no communication problems’, but ‘did not venture’ up the tower to test radios, and had been focusing on the basement ‘because it did not seem to have been picked up on previous visits’


www.frmjournal.com NOVEMBER 2018 9


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