Grenfell: Uncovered

- Right, okay. -

- - Get out! Get out!

We were first there.

Um, first on the scene.

- -

Words can't explain it. It was just mayhem.

Get out of the tower!

It felt like I was in the middle of a disaster movie.

Uh, that one whole side of the building was just, like, completely in flames.

I'd never seen anything like that.

Wow. It's Towering Inferno, innit?

-Fuck. - How is that possible?

When people saw a disaster like this happening in the UK,

there was this sense of, "How could this have been allowed to happen here?"

It seems to me there's bits of the building falling off now.

I've never seen nothing like it.

It's like we're having our own 9/11, mate.

At Grenfell,

you had something completely different, which I'd never seen before,

which was a fire engulfing the whole building.

- Oh my gosh! - How will someone help them?

And it was obvious that something had gone desperately wrong.

There are many questions, most urgently about the cladding

on this building.

Arconic made the aluminum cladding in question.

I do remember thinking somebody had been grossly negligent.

What happened here? How did that get sold? I don't understand that.

Tests had been manipulated. Tests had been hidden.

We've got so much evidence now of really serious wrongdoing,

um, and still no one's been arrested.

The warnings this building was a firetrap apparently went unheard.

This is a police crime scene.

-What do we want? - Justice!

-When do we want it? - Now!

We want answers!

I always think to myself, you know, "Why…

why did this have to happen?"

People losing their lives, you know?

Losing friends, family.

I just think to myself, "Why?"

We want answers! We want justice!

We want answers! We want justice!

BBC News at four o'clock. This is Fenella Fudge.

Plenty of sunshine,

and this sunshine is going to stay with us throughout the day.

The temperature, 24, maybe 25 Celsius. We could even sneak…

No change in the top three.

Luis Fonsi's "Despacito" made it a month at number one.

It's now the longest-reigning foreign language number one

in official chart history.

Back in 2017,

I remember quite a few famous songs at the time.

"Despacito" was a big one.

Remember my mum kept playing it, um, in the house and in the car.

It's your girl Esi,

and you're listening to the biggest station in West London.

This is 100% the song of the summer.

-It's J Hus with "Did You See." -

Yeah, yeah.

I was excited because I was going into year 8.

You know, it was becoming summertime.

It was becoming hot.

I would definitely say I was very bubbly.

Um, I was very happy.

I always wanted to do good in my grades.

Yeah, I was… I was a good, happy 12-year-old.

The A2 is building westbound from Eltham towards Kidbrooke.

Northbound traffic on the Blackwall Tunnel southern approach is building…

I do remember later on that night, we just went out for dinner.

By the time we drove back, it might've been about 11:30.

And then I got a text from a friend,

"Fancy going on Xbox?"

Played a few games.

Said, "Oh, I've got work tomorrow." Switched off and went to bed.

So, yeah, it was as simple as that, really.

Feeling very warm again, with a top temperature of 26 Celsius,

79 Fahrenheit.

I think I went off to bed around midnight.

I was, uh, sleeping in the gym around that time,

just because I didn't like sleeping in the dorm…

…um… with a load of smelly firefighters.

- -

- - Vio!

Madness.

The bells went down at about five to one.

So, being the local station at North Kensington,

Grenfell Tower is on our grounds.

On arrival, we saw some smoke coming out of a window,

which we knew was where the fire was.

We, uh, made our way into the tower.

The two, um, firefighters got ready in all their breathing apparatus.

[ascending footsteps plodding steadily]

You could hear 'em breaking the door down, and then they entered the flat.

It was your everyday kitchen fire,

which they managed to put out quite quickly.

As you do after you've put the fire out, you use your thermal imaging camera

to have a look around to check, make sure there's no hot spots.

And that's when they noticed the droplets of flame dripping,

and they realized that the fire had got out.

I've sent the second crew in to back them up.

I've been to other fires where the fire has got into a flat above.

Although it was unusual,

it wasn't, um, beyond possibilities

that the fire could, um, move up to the flat above.

So I had no reason to believe

we wouldn't soon be going back to the station

to carry on our night shift.

I'd got to the ground floor where I met a young girl

who explained to me that her little sister,

um, was on the 20th floor

and was it all right for her to go up and get her?

She told me her name was Jessica.

I thought I would quickly go up and bring her little sister down to her

and then carry on with what I was doing.

- -I wasn't worried at all.

I pressed the 20th floor…

…and, uh, suddenly the light came on on the 15th floor.

Fifteen.

- The doors opened… -

…and a huge rush of black smoke just filled the lift.

I'm in trouble here. I need to get out.

I need my breathing apparatus, for one,

and I need to get down as quick as I can to get this, um, girl out of her flat.

The breaking news this morning that a major fire

has engulfed a tower block in West London,

and it's been confirmed as Grenfell Tower.

Questions about how a building

that is of a concrete construction

could have been engulfed by flames so quickly.

Get out! Get out!

The thing went up in seconds. Just going up and up and up and up.

I never seen nothing like it.

It was like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie.

- -

I've been writing about Grenfell for seven years.

If you added up all the articles I've written,

it would be over 1,000 by now.

When people saw a disaster like this happening in London, in the UK,

there was this sense of, "How could this have happened here?"

Because it shook people's sense of the country they live in, I think,

that that was a possibility here.

It's changed my life, really.

There was my career up until Grenfell, and then there's my life since,

and it's completely different.

I'd only been the news editor for, um, about five or six months,

which is kind of… a bit of a… bit of a throw-in at the deep end.

I think everyone probably remembers the first time they saw those images.

To be honest, you would not think a cement building…

I think in the aftermath of a fire like Grenfell,

there's a desire, I think, among the media, I would say,

to find a simple scapegoat, a simple narrative.

Someone whose picture they can put in the paper.

Someone who they can paint as the bad guy who made this happen.

The Daily Mail newspaper ran a very aggressive piece

which named the owner of the flat where the fire started.

There's a suggestion on social media

that it's something to do with, like, Islamic terrorism,

when the guy is an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian

who had a picture of the Virgin Mary in his flat.

He was an Uber driver.

He'd lived in a flat on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower for about 25 years.

It's the fourth floor. Quick, quick, quick! Burning.

The police suggested he go into witness protection

because of the level of harassment.

Because once The Daily Mail started,

all the other newspapers were trying to get their story about him too.

He was a survivor, you know, and a victim of what had happened.

He… he had no responsibility at all

for anything that happened at Grenfell Tower.

- Today is 14th June… -

I did have this sense

that something has gone deeply, deeply wrong here.

So you wanna find people who understand fire safety risks in high-rise buildings

and just wanna ask them as many questions as you can.