The firm that made the Grenfell Tower cladding was warned of the risks of a building fire that would kill "60 to 70" people a decade before the tragedy.
The chilling prediction of the Grenfell fire came at a presentation attended by a marketing manager from Arconic who had been "very impressed" by a presentation on fire safety which he attended in 2007.
Gerard Sonntag sent an internal memo suggesting the company stop selling the flammable version of its product. It never happened and the fire, made worse by Arconic's cladding, killed 72.
A consultant, Fred-Roderich Pohl set out the risks of the plastic used to make aluminium composite cladding (ACM), which he said had the same "fuel power" as a 19,000-litre truck of oil. The plastic, polyethylene or PE, is highly flammable. Mr Pohl showed pictures of a fire in Doha, Qatar, which developed quickly in the cladding system.
In his memo about the presentation, Mr Sonntag said Mr Pohl warned: "What will happen if only one building made out of PE is on fire and kills 60 to 70 persons."
It was a chilling prediction of the exact circumstances of the Grenfell Tower fire.
Mr Sonntag's response to the 2007 presentation was to recommend the company stop selling the PE version of the cladding in favour of a fire-retardant (FR) type. He also said Arconic should cut production costs so that the FR version could be produced at the same price as the cheaper PE version. The company kept the PE version on the market until after the Grenfell fire, when the role of the product in allowing flames to spread had become clear.
In June 2011, Arconic warned a Spanish customer not to use its PE panels because they achieved the low fire performance rating E, which the customer remarked was “close to spontaneous combustion”. But in 2014, Arconic sold the same panels to the Grenfell project on the basis of a UK fire performance certificate that suggested the materials were rated B.
In the months after April 2015, when Arconic processed a purchase order selling the PE panels for Grenfell, executives shared technical reports about 10 high-rise fires in different parts of the world using similar cladding panels, warning of the risks.
In a report about a 2014 cladding fire in the Lacrosse building in Melbourne in early May that warned about the “speed and intensity of fire spread”, rising from the eighth to the 21st storey in no more than 15 minutes and penetrating rooms on each floor, a similar pattern to the fire’s progress at Grenfell. The same report showed eight other high-rise fires with very similar cladding around the world.
In October 2015, colleagues sent Arconic’s technical chief, Claude Wehrle pictures of a cladding fire at a medical centre in Saudi Arabia that had used fire retardant panels, where the fire was limited to the lower storeys. Wehrle remarked: “In PE, the fire would have spread over the entire height of the tower, while in this case only the area near the fire is affected..."
In January 2016, after a cladding fire at the Address hotel in Dubai involving PE panels, Wehrle emailed colleagues saying: “I hope that PE will be gradually excluded from facade cladding.”
Later that month there was another fire in the Wolleck tower in France, only 10 metres from a building clad in Reynobond PE. Wehrle told colleagues they were “very lucky” the wind had not changed direction and spread the fire. “We really need to stop proposing PE in architecture! We are in the ‘know’, and I think it is up to us to be proactive … AT LAST.”
Grenfell Tower caught fire 17 months later.
Grenfell Tower inquiry: Fire predicted a decade before, memo shows - BBC News
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