Grenfell Tower Inquiry diary week 51: ‘We teach firefighters to expect building failure’

Insight15.10.214.00 PM by Nathaniel Barker

An unusually brief week of evidence at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry explored how a fire service neighbouring London was taking a different approach to tackling blazes in high rises. Nathaniel Barker reports

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Over the past three weeks, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has unpicked evidence about the actions of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) in the months and years before June 2017. The picture that has emerged is of an organisation slow to learn and change, even in response to major incidents such as the 2009 Lakanal House fire.

Was that an issue specific to the LFB, or did other fire services do things differently? This week the inquiry probed that question.

It was an unusual timetable because the inquiry finished taking evidence unexpectedly early last week. There was just one witness who appeared for one day only: Dr Paul Grimwood, principal fire engineer at Kent Fire and Rescue Service (KFRS).

A different approach

Dr Paul Grimwood giving evidence on Wednesday (picture: Grenfell Tower Inquiry)

Dr Greenwood is a veteran firefighter and fire officer – having started his career at the LFB in 1971 – who has spent stints in the US and Malaysia, tackling blazes in some of the world’s tallest buildings. Based on his experiences overseas, he developed a new approach to firefighting called Rescue, Intervention, Containment, Evacuation (RICE) and introduced it to KFRS between 2010 and 2011.

RICE, Dr Greenwood emphasised at the inquiry, is not a policy or a step-by-step process but a decision-making model for incident commanders, “a set of options” in his words. So, if the facts of the fire require it, E for evacuation may be the first step before intervention (that is, trying to extinguish the fire).

Dr Greenwood came up with the idea after realising that prescriptive existing guidance was leading incident commanders to have a one-track approach in training seminars about how to deal with blazes spreading across multiple floors. “Firefighters were thinking only of the first option: to fight the fire,” he said. Instead, he believed they needed to be encouraged to come up with a plan to respond to the specific circumstances of individual fires. That was the purpose of RICE, and he claimed it led to an “outstanding improvement” in officers’ ability to make the right call at the right time.

The principle underpinning the RICE approach taken in Kent, Dr Greenwood explained, is to prioritise protecting the stairwell. In other words, the incident commander’s priority should be to keep the staircase free of smoke and flames so that people can escape if they need to. That means avoiding, for example, holding stairwell doors open with hoses as you try to put the fire out, which is what happened at Grenfell Tower.

Here’s the interesting part: this stairwell-protection strategy is based on the idea that “we expect the building to be failing in terms of smoke infiltrating to the stair”, Dr Greenwood said. “We teach firefighters to expect failure. We expect a building to perform against the way it’s designed to perform. And even if a building does perform as designed, there are conflicts in the regulations.”

This approach differs dramatically from that commonly taken by the LFB around the same time: where you trust that a building has been designed to contain fire, so focus on trying to extinguish the blaze and keep residents in place.

“I’ve never agreed with the fact that people should have a stay-put policy,” Dr Grimwood told the inquiry. “I believe that a stay-put policy means that the escape routes should always be available to residents, should they need them, so evacuation was important.”

As part of Kent’s approach, Dr Grimwood said, firefighters were trained to know that a fire could spread outside its compartment of origin, including up the external walls, following a series of façade fires abroad. They were told “that evacuation was more important than firefighting in that situation”, he added. Meanwhile, the service was making a note of buildings with cladding in its area.

All that was particularly intriguing in the light of insistences from multiple LFB witnesses at the inquiry that no firefighter in the UK could have been prepared for an event like the Grenfell Tower fire.

What the LFB thought

Inquiry counsel Andrew Kinnier QC (picture: Grenfell Tower Inquiry)

After a 2011 regional evaluation of the stay-put approach (in which the LFB was not involved), several fire services in the South East of England decided to adopt Kent’s approach.

In September of that year, Dr Grimwood met up with Peter Cowup, deputy assistant commissioner at the LFB. At that time, Mr Cowup was contributing to work updating the Generic Risk Assessment 3.2 – a government-published piece of national guidance on fighting fires in high-rises. Before their rendezvous, Dr Grimwood even warned Mr Cowup in an email that: “The concepts of fire containment are now becoming critical and building design and legislation is not following pace with the potential for exterior fire spread.”

Dr Grimwood tried to convince Mr Cowup that the new version of the guidance should mention the stairwell-protection strategy. “We would like to have seen a procedure that had been accepted by nine fire and rescue services at least accepted as an option,” he said. But while Mr Cowup was “interested” in the RICE concept, Dr Grimwood told the inquiry, he took a dimmer view of the staircase-protection approach and ruled out inserting it into the new guidance. His concerns, the inquiry heard, mainly centred around the fact that it represented a significant divergence from existing national guidance, as well as questions about how it could affect firefighters’ safety.

Cross-examination of the “factual” witnesses in the inquiry’s current module has now finished. The inquiry continues and will return next week with appearances from expert witnesses.

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