Let’s talk about it - Grenfell

It is my responsibility as a priest to seek to bring clarity and discernment in places where conflict and pain are found. Listening to conversations and reading comments people have made, I have come to a place where I think I’d like to add my tuppence worth:

Every time the bells go down the firefighter’s heart rates goes up as the race begins to answer the shout for help. And afterwards. The public never see the cloud that hangs over a station when a child is lost, a family taken, a tragedy occurs. On their return these ‘smoke eaters’ retreat to places around the station to battle their demons and shed tears, punch lockers and brood. They take this home with them (being married to a firefighter is not always a bundle of fun) and are made different by what they’ve been part of.

There’s no section in the manual for something different, because even things that look the same, each and every shout is different through the presence of those involved and the places it’s in.

Regarding Grenfell, The vilification of the firefighters on the ground, the clamouring for a scapegoat with the blindness such events confer, adds to the tragedy of this awful episode.

 We ask small groups of people to go where it’s is dangerous to go and in doing so see things none should witness as they do things to protect and save life; and they do it as a matter of choice (none are forced).

Grenfell was the feared ‘towering inferno’ made real for us - 45 years in the making - a fire where the policy of ‘stay inside’ cost lives in the same way that ‘run to the exits’ surely also would have!

The firefighters don’t deserve the public vilification that is aimed at them; the accusations of corporate manslaughter and the anger because someone at the top of the tree gives an opinion that they didn’t like. Did the chief officer smile when she responded? Was it a flippant remark? A throwaway spoken lightly? I don’t think so.

The reality is that Grenfell was a shitstorm brought about by a combination of factors:

The cosmetic cladding (let’s discuss the approval of such material and the reasons for using it - and ask whether it is different from the domestic cladding, soffits and the like used today?)

The reason the product was chosen (was it the safest or the cheapest?)

The audit trail with the fingerprints of all contained within it and their part in this tragedy (not to apportion blame [unless obvious and culpable blame exists] but to learn from this tragic episode).

The safety of our white goods (I personally know of five individuals whose house fire was cause by a domestic appliance - should we start to think about replacement before the burnout part of an appliance’s life becomes literal?).

We need to ensure alarms and the ability to get water to the top of the building, secure fire doors and the like are present, and that all is adequate, tested and maintained (were they?)

My father was a firefighter and his fear that something like this was waiting in the wings was made real for him with the Ronan Point (1968) gas explosion and was fuelled by the ‘Towering Inferno’ film. He would fret over ‘means of escape’ and the potential for lives lost in high rise structures.

I have to say that the only thing Dany Collins did wrong in her response that she,”Wouldn’t change anything,” was that she didn’t say, “I’d knock these high density housing death traps down and get rid of all unnecessary cladding materials and combustible building products where ever we find them!”

And her insensitivity? Should she have wept and said she wished the firefighters had done it differently? (If she had then this is an admission that on the night, on the ground, they did it wrong). She responded with the right answer - insensitive? I don’t think so. Honest? Professional?

Yes, I think it was.

For someone in the control room to hear of a fire in such a setting the practice is to advise them to ‘stay inside’. To tell them to flee is to instruct them to enter into a place where smoke (and asphyxiation) may be present; a place where fire and heat (and doors opening provide oxygen to fuel things further) may be found.

To modify the old military adage: “Everything was planned, tried and tested we knew what we were doing and then we engaged the fire and realised it was like nothing we’d seen before or expected.”

To change the advice and tell people to ‘run for your lives’, now that would have been an invitation that would, in this context, cost lives.

But someone has to pay. Someone needs to be guilty.

Don’t they?