Rather a tactless/nasty thing to say and yet one does feel that his selfish brain had a point somewhere... Maybe you have to be incredibly selfish to point out the elephant in the room but "stay put in the building that's burning" doesn't sound on the face of it like sensible advice ...with the benefit of hindsight.
I followed some discussions on line about whether the LFB advice made any sense. I was advised it was standard advice to stop people running into the flames / dying of smoke inhallation. But is this the truth?
The official report helpfully contains in the executive summary the following timeline...
01.27 Fire reaches the roof and starts to spread horizontally.
01.29 WM Michael Dowden, the LFB incident commander, makes pumps 20 (having made up from 4 to 6, to 8, to 10 and to 15 between
01.13 and 01.28).
01.30 First 999 call reporting fire penetrating a flat (Mariem Elgwahry, Flat 196, floor 22).
01.31 WM Dowden makes pumps 25. By this time 110 out of 297 occupants have escaped; the fire starts to spread to the north elevation of the tower.
01.42 The LAS declares a Significant Incident.
01.45 First NPAS (police) helicopter arrives at the scene.
01.50 WM Dowden hands over incident command to SM Andrew Walton. By this time 168 of 297 occupants had escaped.
01.58 SM Walton hands over incident command to DAC Andrew O’Loughlin.
02.00 Flames travel across the north and east elevations of the tower, and start to spread around the crown and diagonally across the face of the building, affecting flats in the south-east and north-west corners.
02.04 GM Richard Welch declares himself incident commander, not knowing that DAC O’Loughlin has already assumed command. GM Welch makes pumps 40.
02.06 GM Welch declares a Major Incident. 02.11 DAC O’Loughlin takes handover from GM Welch. 02.15 SOM Joanne Smith arrives at the control room.
02.17 Bridgehead moves from floor 2 up to floor 3.
02.20 Flames start to spread to south elevation.
02.26 The LAS declares a Major Incident
02.35 Control room decides to revoke the “stay put” advice and tell all occupants calling 999 to leave the tower.
When the 2:35 advice was put out then what was the situation with the smoke and fire in stairwells?
The executive summary continues...
The spread of fire and smoke within the tower is described in Chapter 25. Many lobbies had started to fill with smoke by around 01.20 and some were significantly smoke-logged by 01.40.
By 02.00 a significant number were heavily smoke-logged. Until around 01.50 there was less smoke in the stairs; by then 168 people had been able to escape.
After that time the stairs started to fill with smoke, particularly at lower levels. At some levels the smoke was thick and the heat considerable. By 02.20 the smoke in the stairs did pose a risk to life, but the stairs were not absolutely impassable to all even after that time.
So clearly the advice given was just wrong and people could easilly have got out if they'd have been told to leave earlier. Even Rees-Mogg like a broken clock is right sometimes and he has point ... the official advice to stay put makes no sense. Several people made the point that there were many cases of the fire brigade turning up to flat fires to find the whole flat burnt out but that the fire had not spread to the rest of the building ... and inferred from this that staying put can in many cases be safer than leaving. However, it's a basic law of physics that heat rises and therefore if you're above a fire you're never going to be as safe as being below it (even if the fire is contained).
So where does this advice come from if it doesn't match with basic physics / common sense? Whenever I've worked in a tall building and there's a fire alarm they evacuate everyone immediately. So why is it different for residential properties? The answer is stairwells are not made to support a mass evacuation... A plan right up there with not having enough lifeboats on the Titanic because it was deemed unsinkable. Indeed I use the word stairwellS ... there was only one.
Watch manager Mr O'Keeffe said: "I didn't have an opinion, other than if people started to evacuate it would become multiple casualties in the stairs and that we would have great difficulty in finding out where people were. But if people start evacuating - when the entire building is on fire or most of it is on fire and the only way down is impossible - that will have been a huge catastrophe."
So in a sense Mr Ress-Mogg was right ...if it had been me I would have been straight out of there because the stay put advice was clearly designed to save lives - not to save my individual life. Like the officers on the Titanic the LFB were effectively trying to reduce panic and/or decide who would and wouldn't be saved and trying to find ways of putting off the inevitable...?
Of course in this case the fire had reached the top of the building by 1:30 moving round the outside due to the flamable cladding and breaching its way in through windows and kitchen extractor outlets. So why did it take till 2pm to start evacuating people...?
A possible further explanation is available in Chapter 25 which explains how the spread of smoke was not equal so that although the stairs remained passable some lobbies were clearly not:
"The speed at which smoke penetrated particular lobbies varied. The smoke that billowed from the north lift when it reached the ground floor at 01.26 is broadly indicative of the volume of smoke in the lobby on floor 10 when it stopped there during its descent. Smoke is likely to have begun to penetrate floor 10 after 01.20 when the external flame front reached that floor. By 01.22 the external flame front had reached the top of floor 11. The rapid accumulation of smoke in the lobby on floor 10 was sufficient to trap three people (Mohamednur Tuccu, Khadija Khalloufi and Ali Yawar Jafari) in that lobby. "
Not that I've had time to read all 800 pages of the phase 1 report - it's incredibly detailed on everything from the cladding to the UPVC windows even showing up pictures of who sat where in the control rooms...
...however, every page one reads simply reinforces the reality that ...well... it was built on the cheap, wasn't it? From the report of the fire to fire engulfing the building took little over an hour. Even if better use had been made of this critical time window there would still have been many deaths...?
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