More than 80 people had to be evacuated after a major fire broke out in east London early Monday, fire officials said. The blaze brought back painful memories of the Grenfell Tower fire that killed 72 people in the city in 2017.
Part of the building in which the fire took place had flammable insulation, or cladding, similar to that which caused the Grenfell fire to spread so fast.
Two people were hospitalized on Monday morning, but there were no fatalities. “Everyone has been accounted for,” Andy Roe, the fire commissioner, said in a statement.
The blaze in Dagenham, in east London, came less than two weeks before the scheduled publication of the final report of an official public inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire. It was Britain’s deadliest residential fire since World War II and set off a national re-examination of the widespread use of dangerous cladding, which was not allowed in many other countries.
“This highlights the painfully slow progress of remediation across the country, and a lack of urgency for building safety as a whole,” Grenfell United, a group which represents of survivors and relatives of victims of the 2017 fire, said in a statement on Monday.
Here’s an update on the Monday fire, the cladding fight and the inquiry into Grenfell.
What happened in Dagenham on Monday?
The cause of the fire is still unknown, fire officials said.
Pictures of the building showed a large central section blackened and charred after the fire had been extinguished, but the full scope of the destruction was unclear.
Aside from the two people taken to the hospital, two others were treated at the scene, the London Ambulance Service said. Margaret Mullane, who represents the area in Parliament, wrote on social media that “injury was minimal” because of the rapid response of firefighters.
The fire brigade said its first crew arrived within five minutes of the 2:44 a.m. call. Around 225 firefighters responded in 40 fire engines.
“There needs to be a full investigation into the cause of this fire, and why, seven years on from Grenfell, unsafe cladding was still in the process of being removed,” Ms. Mullane said in a statement.
What is the debate over cladding?
Cladding is, at its most basic, insulation.
But some forms of cladding — like the kind used in Grenfell, a 24-story public housing building — are highly flammable. After that fire, an executive for the U.S. company Arconic, which made the cladding, acknowledged that the company knew that the material was flammable.
American building codes have effectively banned such cladding in high-rises for nearly two decades, but decades of deregulation in Britain meant builders and their owners could police themselves.
In 2017, an independent review found that construction regulations had allowed dangerous latitude for cutting corners in a culture of “doing things cheaply.”
How much flammable cladding is left in Britain?
Unsafe cladding remains a major problem in Britain, more than seven years after the tragedy.
At least 3,280 buildings over three stories high still have unsafe cladding, according to a government report published last Thursday.
The Dagenham building had “a number of fire safety issues” officials said. Notably, the mixed-use building had “noncompliant cladding,” according to a 2023 application for construction work.
A Facebook post from Valcan, a company that produces noncombustible cladding, said last week that the old material was in the process of being removed and replaced.
How is Britain doing on removing this cladding?
The government is working to identify buildings with unsafe cladding and replace it. In 2021, it announced billions of dollars in additional funding to help replace the material.
Remediation efforts have been completed for about 30 percent of the 4,630 residential buildings initially identified as having unsafe cladding. Replacement efforts are underway at about 20 percent of the remaining buildings.
But no work has yet begun on 50 percent of all the buildings that have been identified. And more are still being found: From June to July this year, 17 more buildings were flagged.
What’s the latest on the Grenfell tragedy?
A police investigation into the fire, Operation Northleigh, is ongoing, but the police have said that no criminal charges will be announced until at least late 2026, the BBC reported.
For now, many are bracing for the final report from the official inquiry into the disaster. Residents had said for years that Grenfell Tower was dangerous: It had only one staircase and lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and fire escapes.
The first report, in 2019, focused on the emergency services. It was critical of the London Fire Brigade and found that some -residents would have survived if they had not been told to stay put.
Firefighters and survivors criticized the inquiry for not focusing on the cladding and those responsible for its installation. The September report is expected to add more insights into the materials.
“The principal focus of Phase 2 will be on the decisions which led to the installation of a highly combustible cladding system on a high-rise residential building and the wider background against which they were taken,” the leader of the inquiry, Martin Moore-Bick, wrote in 2019.
“We expect to see the truth,” Grenfell United wrote on X. “We expect to see accountability. We expect to see consequences. And then we expect to see charges.”
The post A Fire in East London Recalls Deadly Grenfell Cladding Scandal appeared first on New York Times.