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Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 24: ‘Do you accept that Test 5B was Arconic’s deadly secret?’

Insight19.02.2112.15 PM by Peter Apps

The president of the firm that made and sold the cladding panels installed on Grenfell Tower was asked to account for the apparent concealment of “disastrous” fire tests on the product this week. Peter Apps reports

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In order to properly explain the shocking evidence put before the Grenfell Tower Inquiry this week, it is necessary to begin with a few explanations.

The first is precisely who we were hearing from. The primary witness this week was Claude Schmidt, who has been president of AAP SAS since 2009.

AAP SAS is the French arm of the multinational American-based aluminium company Arconic. It is the company which made and sold the product that is at the heart of this inquiry: the Reynobond 55 PE panels, aluminium sheets bonded together with highly combustible polyethylene.

These were the panels on the outside of Grenfell Tower and have been identified as the “primary cause” of the rapid fire spread up its walls.

A critical fact to understand for this week’s evidence is that there were two ways these panels could be attached to the walls of a building: riveted (where they were bolted to the walls) or cassette (where they bent and hung on rails), as shown in the diagram below.

Arconic allowed post-Grenfell certificate for cladding to repeat false fire test claim

As we will see, this made a substantial difference to their fire performance, with the cassette system burning 10 times more fiercely. This cassette form is the way the panels were fitted to Grenfell Tower.

Finally, it is important to know that at the time the tower was refurbished, English building guidance set two potential fire safety standards which cladding panels used on a high rises could meet: European Class B or a national standard specific to England and Wales called Class 0. This latter class was weaker and easier to obtain.

With all of that held in mind, let us begin the story in November 2004.

“Do you accept that the cassettes performed spectacularly worse than the rivet-fix?”

In late 2004, new pan-European standards for fire performance had recently been introduced and Arconic knew details of how its products performed against these standards would soon be requested by its clients across Europe.

It therefore commissioned two tests at French national testing facility CSTB for its Reynobond 55 PE panels, one for the riveted and one for the cassette system. These tests were carried out in November 2004 and the reports issued in January 2005.

What they showed was startling. While the riveted system obtained a B grading, the cassette system performed disastrously. It burned 10 times more quickly than the rivet system, let off seven times as much heat and three times as much smoke. The test – referred to as Test 5B – was halted after 850 seconds and the result was so poor that no grade could be given.

“The results are not usable but give an idea of the fire behaviour of the product,” the CSTB report said.

“Do you accept that the cassettes, according to this Test 5B, performed spectacularly worse than the rivet-fix?” asked counsel to the inquiry Richard Millett QC.

“Yes,” responded Mr Schmidt (pictured above), speaking through a translator.

“One possible view is that it was irrational and irresponsible not to carry out further tests”

This confounded the expectations of Arconic. It expected the rivet panel to perform worse – given that its edges exposed the petrol-like polyethylene to the flames.

But Arconic, according to the witness statement of technical manager Claude Wehrle, did not take this result seriously. “No one really understood it,” he said. “The company had no reason to suspect this was anything other than the rogue result of a standard classification test.”

The company commissioned no further testing to confirm or dispute this and Mr Schmidt accepted when questioned that its view was “no more than untested assumption”.

“One possible view of the way that Arconic responded to that test we’re discussing is that it was irrational and irresponsible not to carry out further tests,” said inquiry chair Sir Martin Moore-Bick (pictured above). “What would you say about that?”

“Yes, as I said, I think that extra tests should have been carried out,” said Mr Schmidt.

But with the test dismissed as a rogue result (‘aberrant’ in French), no such testing was done and no information about the extreme fire risk of using it was disseminated to the market. The product was simply advertised as Class B, based on the successful test of the rivet system.

“Do you accept that Test 5B was Arconic’s deadly secret?” asked Mr Millett. Mr Schmidt disagreed, saying “there are many things that we do use every day which do give rise to certain risks”.

“Do you accept, as the voice of Arconic, that not providing test 5B to the BBA was a deliberate concealment of the true position?”

In 2006 Arconic sought a certificate from the British Board of Agrément (BBA) for its Reynobond cladding panels. In his witness statement, Claude Wehrle said this certificate was “largely obtained for marketing purposes”.

The BBA is a respected certification body which provides confirmation to UK construction professionals that a particular product meets the standards to which it is advertised.

For its product to be used on high rises in England and Wales, Arconic needed the certificate to confirm that it had a Class 0 rating, or a Euroclass B rating. It did both.

In order to obtain a ‘Class 0’ the firm supplied test data from 2003. But this, as the BBA could see, was carried out on a more fire retardant version of the product, which contained far less polyethylene. The certificate covered both varieties of panel.

But the certificate (pictured above) also said the panels had “achieved a classification” of European Class B. This was based wholly on the test on the rivet system. Arconic never told the British Board of Agrément (BBA) about the catastrophic failure when the panel was bent into cassettes.

This was despite a clause in the contract which required Arconic to provide “all test data” to the BBA, and a diagram in the certificate showed both rivet and cassette fixes.

“Do you accept, as the voice of Arconic, that not providing Test 5B to the BBA was a deliberate concealment of what Arconic knew to be the true position, namely that the cassette variant of Reynobond 55 PE performed disastrously in a fire?” asked Mr Millett.

“No. When you say deliberate, that’s too much,” said Mr Schmidt, explaining that the test was never asked about during audits by the BBA.

“Do you accept that in presenting the rivet Test 5A only to the BBA as representative of the fire performance of Reynobond 55 PE, Arconic was telling the BBA a misleading half truth?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes, you can see it like that,” said Mr Schmidt.

The BBA certificate would later be relied on by the team refurbishing Grenfell Tower.

“This shortfall in relation to this standard is something we have to keep VERY CONFIDENTIAL!!!!”

In 2009, an office block in Bucharest clad with polyethylene-cored ACM caught fire, and the flames ripped up the building. Mr Wehrle emailed three of his colleagues, including Mr Schmidt, attaching pictures of the wrecked facade (above).

“Here are some pictures to show you how dangerous PE can be when it comes to architecture,” he wrote.

Mr Schmidt explained that nothing was done because the fire had burned only on the walls of the building, there had been no injuries and its competitors did not act either.

But concern was evidently building in the market about PE. In March 2010, one of its European salespeople, Isabel Moyses emailed Mr Wehrle to say that a competitor, Larson, was no longer offering polyethylene-cored panels in Spain as they did not meet the required ‘B’ grade and was only offering fire retardant panels. She warned that if Arconic did the same “our prices are no longer in line with market trends”.

In response, Mr Wehrle wrote that he believed this was because Larson could not obtain the result for its cassette system. “And Reynobond PE in cassette form does not obtain level ‘B’ either,” he wrote. “Having said that, this shortfall in relation to this standard is something we have to keep VERY CONFIDENTIAL!!!!”

His boss, sales and marketing director, Guy Scheidecker, responded: “This shouldn’t even have been mentioned.”

“It looks as if Arconic was simply keen to stop this information getting out; do you accept that?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes. Yes, it seems to say that,” said Mr Schmidt.

“Do you accept that Arconic was deliberately and dishonestly misleading its customers about the claimed fire certification [of the] cassette variant for Reynobond 55 PE?” asked Mr Millett.

“Well, in any case, regarding the B classification... yes,” replied Mr Schmidt.

“We are not ‘clean’”

A few months later in July, Isabel Moyses, one of the firm’s European salespeople, received an email from a Portugese client requesting testing information on the cassette system specifically. She forwarded the request to Mr Wehrle.

“Isa,” he wrote. “It’s hard to make a note about this… Because we are not ‘clean.’”

“Did you know that Arconic was not clean at this time in any sense?” asked Mr Millett (pictured above).

“No,” replied Mr Schmidt.

Mr Wehrle then wrote to the customer. But instead of coming clean about the deficiency of the cassette panel, he said the opposite.

The rivet core, he explained “exposes the core of the material to the flame”, as opposed to the cassette system “where the core is protected”. “[Arconic] decided to check the behaviour of its panels in its worse case… and to use it for all other systems,” he wrote.

This was the total opposite of what its testing to this point had shown.

“Do you accept that in telling Mr Costa that rivet was worse than cassette for the purposes of fire performance, Mr Wehrle lied to him?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes,” said Mr Schmidt.

“Oops”

In 2011, Arconic commissioned further testing on the Reynobond panel. The results were repeated: in rivet form, the panel obtained a Class B, in cassette form it performed as badly – the test was stopped and no classification could be given apart from an F.

“Oops,” Mr Wehrle wrote to his colleagues. “The classification of PE in cassettes following the test this morning is… ‘F’!!!”

A repeat test was commissioned in October, at which point the panel was able to scrape its way to an E classification.

By 2012, Mr Wehrle wanted to discuss this matter with Mr Schmidt, the head of the company. He requested a meeting, saying the fire classification of the polyethylene panels was a “serious issue”. “We would like to hear your opinion on the position to be held on the market,” he wrote.

But Mr Schmidt did not take the meeting. Asked why not, he said: “I can’t answer. I was overloaded with work and I didn’t think of it.”

Mr Wehrle in his witness statement claimed the pair had a “brief discussion” when it was agreed that the reference to Class B should be removed from marketing literature. This is, of course, some way short of advertising the fact that it had a Class E.

While there is some evidence that it happened (the inquiry was shown a brochure where the reference was removed for a 2012 edition), Mr Schmidt did not shed any light – simply answering “I don’t remember” when pressed.

“We can still work with national regulations who are not as restrictive”

One fact hanging over all this evidence is that a Euroclass B classification was not the only route to getting onto the walls of a tall building in England and Wales. As explained above, an alternative route was available: the national Class 0.

This is a far less demanding test – primarily concerned with the spread of flame over the surface of a product.

It is also one successive governments had been advised to remove and replace with a higher standard, with a range of experts citing the fact that combustible materials could obtain it.

Arconic never obtained a Class 0 pass for Reynobond 55 PE. But it did obtain the grade for a forerunner product – Reynobond 160 PE, which passed the required tests in 1997 at testing house Warrington Fire.

While Mr Schmidt claimed that these two materials were identical, the inquiry was shown a statement from an employee from the firm’s US operation which disputed this and said the polyethylene was different.

Arconic did not submit the 1997 test to the BBA, preferring the 2003 result on a fire-retardant product.

Nonetheless, it was clear throughout Mr Schmidt’s evidence that he believed the reason Arconic was able to sell the panels into the UK market for high rises was because of this lower standard. Referring to the UK as a “PE [polyethylene] market”, he said that the product was banned in other countries, such as Poland, Russia and Kazakhstan, but the UK had taken a different route.

“Is the reason why the UK remained a PE market that the UK regulations permitted the sale of PE, whereas gradually other markets, other jurisdictions, began to restrict it?” asked Mr Millett.

“Yes, I think so,” Mr Schmidt replied.

Indeed, the inquiry saw that following the test failures in 2011, Mr Wehrle held a meeting in Freiburg, Germany, with one of Arconic’s major competitors, 3A. Notes of the meeting say the following: “The evolution of fire regulation will put PE out of the market in coming month[s].

“For the moment, even if we know that PE material in cassette has a bad behaviour exposed to fire, we can still work with national regulations who are not as restrictive.”

It will be for UK politicians and officials to explain why we were viewed as one of these markets when they finally take the stand in October.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry: week 24 headlines

Grenfell cladding firm president accepts staff ‘lied’ and ‘misled’ customers about fire performance: The president of the French firm which sold the cladding panels used on Grenfell Tower has accepted its staff “misled” and “lied” to customers, as he was grilled about a series of internal emails which showed it hiding serious test failures from the market.
Grenfell cladding firm told ‘misleading half truth’ in concealing fire test failure: The president of the firm that sold the highly combustible cladding panels used on Grenfell Tower has accepted that the company told “a misleading half truth” by concealing a “spectacular” test failure from the body that certified the fire performance of the product.
Grenfell cladding boss denies fire test failure was Arconic’s ‘deadly secret’: The president of the firm which sold the highly combustible cladding panels used on Grenfell Tower today denied that a 2005 test in which it failed “spectacularly” was Arconic’s “deadly secret”.
Arconic told all French customers to use more fire safe product a year before Grenfell: The company that sold the highly combustible cladding panels for use on Grenfell Tower told its French salespeople to recommend a more fire-safe product for all buildings from 2016 onwards but did not do the same in the UK.

Grenfell Tower Inquiry phase two: weekly diaries

Module one: the refurbishment

Week one: A vivid picture of a broken industry

After a week of damning revelations at the opening of phase two of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, Peter Apps recaps the key points