A view from the States:
Why Grenfell Tower Burned: Regulators Put Cost Before Safety
LONDON — The doorbell woke Yassin Adam just before 1 a.m. A neighbor was frantically alerting others on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower about a fire in his apartment. “My fridge blew up,” the man shouted.
Residents of Grenfell Tower
had complained for years that the 24-story public housing block invited catastrophe. It lacked fire alarms, sprinklers and a fire escape. It had only a single staircase. And there were concerns about a new aluminum facade that was supposed to improve the building — but was now whisking the flames skyward.
The facade, Mr. Adam said, “burned like a fire that you pour petrol on.”
The incineration of Grenfell Tower on June 14, the deadliest fire in Britain in more than a century,
is now a national tragedy. The London police on Friday blamed flammable materials used in the facade for the spread of the blaze and said the investigation
could bring charges of manslaughter. Hundreds of families
were evacuated from five high-rises that posed similar risks.
............For years, members of Parliament had written letters requesting new restrictions on cladding, especially as the same flammable facades were blamed for fires in Britain, France, the United Arab Emirates, Australia and elsewhere. Yet British authorities resisted new rules. A top building regulator explained to a coroner in 2013 that requiring only noncombustible exteriors in residential towers “limits your choice of materials quite significantly.”...............
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/world/europe/grenfell-tower-london-fire.html?_r=0