Lakanal fire victims should have been told to leave
The six people who died in the Lakanal House tower block fire should have been told to get out of the building, an inquest has heard.
Peter Holland, chief fire and rescue advisor for the Communities and Local Government department, told the inquest last week that fire controllers should tell residents to leave a building in a fire unless a ‘stay put’ principle is in place.
Earlier in the inquest jurors heard harrowing accounts of the calls made by the people who died in the blaze, and how they were told by operators to stay in their flats.
Last Thursday Mr Holland told the inquest: ‘If you think they [the residents] are in jeopardy [you] tell them to get out of the flat involved.’
He said fire brigade control at the time of the fire on 3 July 2009 would not have known whether a stay put policy applied to Lakanal House, so the default policy of telling the residents to ‘get out and stay out’ if fire and smoke entered their property should have been applied.
The stay put policy is based on the idea of ‘compartmentation’ – where a fire is contained in a flat for 60 minutes. This means a fire should not be able to spread beyond the flat where it starts before being dealt with.
The Lakanal fire spread rapidly from where it started to the flat above. The inquest has heard it travelled up the outside of the block and managed to reach the flat above as panels, fitted during a 2006/07 refurbishment, burnt through in under five minutes.
Brian Martin, a building regulations expert at CLG, told the inquest: ‘It’s rare you need to impose any fire resistance on the external envelope on a block of flats because you’re dealing with such a small compartment.’
Counsel to the inquest James Maxwell-Scott asked him: ‘Is it your view [that] the area permitted to be unprotected would in fact be 100 per cent of the walls of Lakanal House?’ ‘I’d be quite surprised if it was anything else,’ he answered. Building regulations only require fire resisting materials on the outside of a block if they are certain distance away from other buildings, jurors heard.
Catherine Hickman, 31, died in the flat above where the fire started. It then spread rapidly to next door flat 81 in which Helen Udoaka, 34, died with her 20-day-old baby Michelle Udoaka, and Dayana Francisquini, 26, and her two children, three-year-old Felipe and six-year-old Thais.
The evidence in the inquest finished last week and the coroner is expected to sum up this week.
