By Danielle Aumord

Further evidence from fire engineer and expert witness Dr. Barbara Lane about fire risk assessor Carl Stokes’ actions was heard by the public inquiry into the blaze at Grenfell, as the section of its work covering the management and maintenance of tower concluded.

Should the fire risk assessments have taken account of external walls at Grenfell and at any tower block where dangerous material have been found in them, was the question asked by the Grenfell inquiry.

Dr. Lane said that if reliance was being placed on external walls to stop a potential fire spreading between flats, then they should be assessed, especially if a stay put policy is in place, as it was with Grenfell.

But only recently, has central government passed legislation that brings the outside walls of buildings into the scope of fire risk assessments.

However Dr. Lane told the inquiry that some of her clients were asking her about the hazards that external walls in tower blocks posed, as far back as 2013.

Freelance Grenfell fire risk assessor Carl Stokes did actually raise the issue of the cladding on the external walls of the tower as a potential hazard, but he then took it out of the hazard list and instead said it was “fire rated”.

Dr. Lane said that this was a serious error: “When Mr Stokes made the decision to incorporate the cladding into his risk assessment… as far as I’m concerned, he should have read the fire strategy to understand what the materials were, and before he declared it fire rated, which is a specific performance description, he needed to have information about the basic products used in the external wall to allow him to make that statement.”

The phrase “fire rated” implies a specific type of fire performance, the ability to resist fire by the cladding or insulation used, which is achieved through specific testing, which the walls at Grenfell were never subject to.

The failure to identify residents with disabilities and the absence of plans for their evacuation, was another crucial question to which Dr. Lane pointed to official guidance documents (British Standard 9991 and PAS 79). These documents specify that the evacuation of disabled residents, in the event of a fire, must be planned for, without reliance on firefighters. Her viewpoint is that it is a legal requirement for all residents including disabled people, to be provided with a ‘means of escape’.

However the inquiry heard that in four risk assessments at Grenfell, between 2012 and 2016, Mr. Stokes said that there was “no evidence” of residents with a hearing impairment.

His risk assessments said that KCTMO was in the process of gathering up this information on its ‘TP Tracker’ database and that he would update his assessment with any identified residents. But the tracker system was discontinued from September 2013 – resulting in dozens of unidentified disabled and vulnerable Grenfell residents.

On top of this, Mr. Stokes also misclassified the lifts at the Tower and said in his assessments that they could be used to evacuate residents. But the inquiry heard before the summer break, that the lifts at Grenfell didn’t meet the “firefighting” standards, which meant they could not be used for evacuation.

In concluding statements for the module examining the management and maintenance of Grenfell, lawyers representing Kingspan, Celotex and Arconic denied accusations that they had manipulated fire test data to gain “fire rated” certificates for the use of their cladding on the tower.

They argued that they were not responsible for the way their products had been used on Grenfell.

But upon hearing the evidence at the inquiry into the tragedy where 72 people perished, a lawyer representing the Mayor of London criticized both the “disregard of the human life” by those involved in the West London regeneration project and the “institutional indifference to safety” by the manufacturers of the cladding and insulation used on Grenfell.

Sam Stein QC, who represented a group of bereaved, survivors and residents said: “Evidence from all three companies showed no regard was given to the danger that their products posed to the public. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way of market share. If there was a bad test, it was ignored, and the next one rigged until the desired result was achieved.”

Module five of the inquiry, which will focus on ‘firefighting’, will begin next week.