William Watkin - Bioviolence: How the Powers That Be Make Us Do What They Want

It was warm the night Behailu Kebedes fridge exploded. People had their windows open, curtains stirring in the air up and down the edifice of the tower, like strings of flags. The eternal London thunder of traffic, sirens, thumping base and lubricious voices floated into those flats, borne by a listless breeze coming in from the far distant Atlantic, easing its way across the Oxfordshire plain, before tumbling down the shallow lee sides of the nearby Chiltern Hills.

*bang*

Mr. Kebebe was rudely awoken from his fitful sleep. Something had gone off like a firecracker nearby, from the room next door it sounded like. Behailu jumped from his bed and rushed into the small kitchen where he saw the flames coming from the white goods. His first thought was to wake his neighbour Maryam, but she had already heard the commotion and met him in the hallway between their two flats. Behailu, clearly agitated, told Maryam there was a fire. She went with him into flat 16 to see if it was cause for concern. It was 12:50 am precisely.

The flames coming out of Behailus old fridge werent very big, but it was enough to alarm the pregnant Maryam. A hasty call was made to the police, then she exited the building in such a panic she left the mobile phone she used to make the call behind. Behailu, meanwhile, lingered long enough in the building to wake all his neighbours on the fourth floor. One of them, Alison Moses, remembers meeting firemen on the stairwell, as she left, descending from higher storeys. They told Alison that the 13th floor was full of smoke which confused her. It was quite a jump from the 4th to the 13th floor, maybe around a hundred feet. From what Behailu had told her, it seemed impossible that such a small appliance fire could have travelled that far, that quickly. Confusion at this news began to percolate down the stairwell, as the unchecked fire boiled up the outside walls.

It was later discovered that flames had managed to exit flat 16, Kebedes home, through his kitchens open window. Sneaky as they are, these tongues of fire had then finagled themselves between the tower block walls and their new cladding. The cladding had been attached to the exterior of the building during a recent refurbishment, by all accounts, not very professionally. The seals between the cladding and the new windows, for example, were often broken, letting in drafts. Many residents had taken to plugging up the gaps with bits of material. Flammable stuff, for the most part. A classic inner-city hack in lieu of a centrally sanctioned solution. Even worse, between each panel of cladding should have been a seal to stop the spread of fire but the seals failed or were never installed. This permitted the cavity between the walls and the cladding to act as a kind of chimney, speedily drawing up the flames from floor 4 to floor 13, where all that smoke was that the firemen had spotted. Then, rapidly, up the entire flank of the 221-foot, 23-storey West London tower block, home to around 350 people. As these flames met with one of those ill-fitted windows, dodgy frame stuffed with old newspaper and suchlike, you can imagine how easy it was for the fire to penetrate into the flats themselves. Within a remarkably brief time, the conflagration was out of control and engulfed the whole block, raining down smouldering fragments of that flammable cladding onto the moneyed streets and gathering, well-heeled crowd below.