The Sunday Times Magazine - UK (2022-06-12)

The Sunday Times Magazine • 13

and around the building, the inquiry found.

At 660C the aluminium sheets in the

cladding melt too. Temperatures at Grenfell

would exceed 1,000C.

The insulation, fitted behind the

cladding to reduce heat loss from the flats,

“contributed” to fire spread, the inquiry

added. Most of the tower was wrapped in

RS5000 polyisocyanurate foam insulation,

made by Celotex; the rest had K15 phenolic

foam insulation, by the Irish multinational

Kingspan. Both types were flammable. The

former also released toxic gas including

hydrogen cyanide as it burnt.

In flat 66 on the ninth floor, directly above

the fire, Zak smelt plastic burning. His dad,

Salah Chebiouni, a school caretaker, got up

and shouted from the kitchen. Zak went to

peer out the window. “Fire shot straight

up, in front of my face,” he told the inquiry.

He ran straight to his little sister, Sara, and

grabbed her out of bed. “You lot can stay,

but I’m taking my sister,” he told his parents,

who remembered a sign by the lifts that

stated in the event of a fire “you should

initially be safe inside your flat”.

Zak carried Sara down the tower’s single

narrow staircase past two firefighters who

tried to send him back upstairs. The advice

at this time was that it was safer for people

on floors where the fire wasn’t already

raging to stay indoors. Zak’s parents, Salah

and Hanan Wahabi, a teacher, followed.

Outside Zak gave his sandals and abaya

(gown) to his sister, who was barefoot in

her pyjamas. Then he called Yasin. “You

have to leave now,” he told his cousin.

“Cool, cool, I’m coming.” Yasin replied.

But Yasin and his family never came.

It was 1.27am. The fire had sprinted up

19 floors in 14 minutes. Flames reached the

roof and started spreading sideways around

the top of the building. Police helicopters

circled overhead. There was an acrid

smell in the air.

Amid the chaos a father tied bedsheets

together, ready to climb out of a window

with his daughter on his back. Another

man guided his pregnant wife and two girls

down 21 floors but their baby son was killed

by cyanide poisoning in the womb. In less

than three hours the inferno engulfed the

whole building.

A

s a nation awoke to images of

the burning tower, it seemed

inconceivable that a building in one

of the most prosperous parts of the

capital could go up in flames, as

one witness said, “like a matchstick”.

We now know it was not the first

time that this type of cladding had erupted

into a fireball. On July 18, 2001, experts had

stood in a hangar at the privatised Building

Research Establishment (BRE) in Watford

and watched as the same type of panels that

were on Grenfell Tower catastrophically

failed a government-funded test.

Dr Sarah Colwell, a scientist at BRE, was

one of those who looked on “shocked” as a

9m mock wall with ACM cladding was set

alight. It failed just three minutes into the

30-minute test; within five minutes flames

roared 20m high, as tall as a six-storey

building. Colwell told the inquiry: “It was

a very rapid, very large fire growth.”

The government did not ban this cladding.

It also failed to shut a fateful loophole: the

widely misunderstood Class 0 standard,

which rates how fast fire spreads on a

From far left: Jessica Urbano

Ramirez died weeks before

her 13th birthday; the

survivors Hanan Wahabi, far

left, her children, Sara and

Zak, and Samira Hamdan,

aunt of the surviving Belkadi

daughter, photographed last

month; CCTV footage shows

Zak rescuing Sara

Clockwise from far left: Abdulaziz

and Faouzia El-Wahabi died in the

tower with their children, Mehdi,

Nur Huda and Yasin, cousins of

Zak and Sara, above

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