Grenfell: Uncovered is Netflix’s latest addition to its non-fiction library, and the in-depth documentary film is effectively provocative and enraging at the same time, putting into perspective the classist nature of today’s world. The film covers the incidents following the horrific fire that broke out in Grenfell Tower in London, as it was no mere accident but the result of a series of intentional negligent choices. Overall, Grenfell: Uncovered is a moving documentary film that is definitely not as glamorous or light-hearted as many other Netflix true-crime documentaries, and it serves as perhaps the only form of justice to the people who were killed or affected by the tragedy.
What was the Grenfell Tower fire?
Grenfell: Uncovered begins with the accounts of two individuals very different from one another in terms of age and profession—a teenager named Luana Gomes, currently a college student, and David Badillo, a firefighter. The lives of both these individuals dramatically changed in the early hours of 14th June, 2017, when a hurried call was placed to the fire emergency number in North Kensington, in West London. Luana remembers having gone out for dinner with her family that night, while her father, Marcio, recalls how he even played a few online games with his friends before going to bed. Some distance away, David had gone to sleep in the gym of the fire station, as he and his coworkers would on most days. But he was soon woken up by the ringing bells at the station, as the officials had been alerted, at around 12:55 am, of a fire at one of the flats in Grenfell Tower.
David and his team rushed to the location and realized that it was quite an unremarkable kitchen fire that had broken out in flat number 16, on the 4th floor of the 24-story tower, and it did not take them much effort to put it out. As per protocol, they checked the whole place with their thermal imaging camera after putting out the fire, just to be sure that there were no traces of it left, and this is when it first appeared to them that it had seemingly spread to some of the other flats as well. While coming down the stairs to check the extent of the fire from the outside, David ran across a young girl who informed him that her sister was stuck on the 20th floor, and without thinking much of it, he immediately took the lift up to rescue the girl. However, the lift never made it past floor 15, and as its doors opened, David remembers being engulfed by a thick black smoke from the corridors.
In reality, the small and seemingly simple kitchen fire that David and his team had originally come to put out had spread massively before they could stop it. Based on the information presented in the documentary, it seems like the fire had already started to spread in the 11 minutes that the fire station took to respond to the emergency, but it had not taken a disastrous shape yet, because of which David and his coworkers did not notice it at first. It was only after they had entered the building, climbed up to the flat with the fire, and put it out that the flames spread dangerously and engulfed one entire side of the building, burning down the exterior façade rapidly. News teams rushed to the location as well, as it quickly took shape into one of the worst fires in London in decades, while more teams of firefighters were deployed to deal with the spreading fire.
Witnesses in the area called it a scene straight out of the movies, as flames shot up the exterior of the tower in mere seconds, spreading into many flats and injuring, trapping, and possibly already killing many of the people who had been peacefully sleeping in their homes until just a few minutes before. Luana and Marcio Gomes were also residents of Grenfell Tower, who had been happily living there for many years, until the horrific fire threatened their lives as well. Ultimately, the Grenfell Tower fire went on for 60 hours, and more than 250 firefighters and 70 fire trucks had to be deployed to deal with the incident. It was only in the evening of the 16th of June that the fire could be officially announced to have been contained, but the enormous building had been almost entirely destroyed by this time. More tragically, 70 people were reported to have been severely injured by the fire, while 70 others had died on the spot, with 2 more being added to the list of victims as they passed away while being treated at the hospital.
Why did the Grenfell fire tragedy take place?
Following the tragic incident, people were naturally keen to find out the reason and source of the fire, and it was found to have been an electronic fire caused by a faulty refrigerator in one of the flats. The Daily Mail went on and revealed the name and photograph of the owner of this faulty refrigerator, almost insinuating that he was to blame, and people on social media did not hesitate to lash out against him. As journalist Peter Apps points out, everyone was desperate to find a soft target to blame for the travesty, and the media (as the Daily Mail was soon followed by other established news outlets) simply made use of this desperation to sell their stories. Narratives about the fires possibly having some Islamic terrorist connection were also suggested on social media, but there was simply no basis to any of these claims.
The fire caused by the faulty refrigerator was indeed a common matter, containing the likes of which is considered to be a fairly easy task for firefighters all over the world, but there was a very different reason behind the Grenfell Tower tragedy taking the shape that it eventually took. One of the immediate thoughts that hit most witnesses and victims was about how a concrete building, with no wood material at all, could go up in flames so quickly. The answer to this was the kind of cladding that had been used to layer the exterior of the Grenfell Tower, as a material known as Aluminum Composite Material, or ACM, had been used in this particular case. Essentially, this cladding material has sheets of aluminum on two sides, held together by a thin layer of polymer, meaning plastic.
Any kind of plastic, and especially the cheapest kind to use in these cladding materials, polyethylene, is extremely flammable, and this was the very reason the fire had spread so quickly in Grenfell Tower. Only a few years before, the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council, the government administration in charge of overseeing the locality, had ordered the cladding of Grenfell Tower, mostly for cosmetic purposes, and ACM tiles with polyethylene had been used for the renovation. On the 14th of June, the flames from the refrigerator must have gotten to the building’s exterior, where the ACM cladding started burning almost immediately, and the fire then spread all over the building and into numerous flats.
What Is The ‘Stay Put’ Policy?
Along with the cladding material that had rapidly spread across the tower, there were other failures on various administrative and executive levels as well, which turned the incident into a horrific tragedy. One of these was the failure of a government policy known as ‘Stay Put,’ because of which many more lives were lost on that night than normal. In the United Kingdom, the government exercises a policy called ‘Stay Put’ in towers and buildings above a certain height, according to which the residents or people trapped inside these buildings in case of a fire are instructed to stay put inside their own flats or offices.
The idea behind this policy is that these residential towers and buildings over the designated height are made in such a manner that each flat or office is designed to contain fire within itself, and there is no threat of the flames spreading. Therefore, the fire can be contained by the firefighters at its source point, and people do not need to rush out of the building to save themselves. Residents would understandably panic and try to escape the building during a fire accident, which would cause even more chaos and might lead to more harm than good. Something similar did happen at Grenfell Tower as well, when a man desperately tried to climb out of the window of his flat, which would have surely killed him, and his neighbors had to pull him back in.
As per the protocol, the ‘Stay Put’ policy was in practice during the Grenfell Tower fire as well, as most of the residents took shelter in flats where the fire had not yet spread, and the team of firefighters waited for the main fire to be contained before going to rescue them. However, as the whole building caught fire because of the cladding, the flames reached the flats being used as shelter as well, and the people inside them died while waiting for help. The firefighters and the authorities did realize that the policy was backfiring in this case, and so they tried to help as many residents out as they could, but many of the upper floors were completely inaccessible by this time. As the authorities later admitted, and David Badillo talks about in the documentary, the fire department had failed catastrophically in dealing with the incident, as they had no pertinent training about what to do in these cases.
How did the administration clearly put the citizens in danger?
The most shocking part about the incident at Grenfell Tower was that there had been numerous missteps on the administration’s part and also the government in allowing for such an accident to become a reality. To begin with, the ACM made by the American company Alcoa had been banned in many countries across the world, the USA included, because of its highly inflammable nature. Although the fact that these panels are very susceptible to catching fire was proven both in lab experiments and also through real-life incidents, Alcoa did not do anything to alter their product and just doubled down on selling it in the markets that still allowed for it.
The UK was one such market, and so the government deserves some blame for not regulating its market enough. As per the experts appearing in Grenfell: Uncovered, much of this was due to Tony Blair’s policy on massively reducing regulations on private companies. But this was not the only administrative failure, as the two boards of authority overseeing the operations at Grenfell Tower, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC) and the Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organization (KCTMO), were both responsible for tremendous negligence. It was a known fact to all the victims and their families that the Tenant Management Organization treated them very unfairly, to the point of treating them like 2nd-class citizens, despite them paying rent for the accommodation.
There was a clearly classist angle to the whole matter, as the residents of Grenfell Tower, and the building in itself, were considered unfit for the otherwise posh and affluent neighborhood of Kensington. Although the residents were paying rent for their flats, nobody liked them, and the tower is literally referred to as the ‘ugly cousin’ in official documents. In fact, the renovation work in which the dangerous cladding had been added was carried out only to make the building, which had not been maintained by the authorities, look fancy enough to fit in with the rest of the neighborhood. When this renovation was initially proposed, it had been mentioned that zinc cladding would be used to cover the building, which would have been the safest material to use. However, in order to save a few thousand pounds, the RBKC and the KCTMO settled on ACM panels, which resulted in the tragedy.
Internal documents later revealed by journalists have confirmed that people working at Alcoa, and most notably their CEO, Claude Wehrle, had known about the demerits of ACM panels. But more shockingly, it was confirmed that administrative officers at both the RBKC and the KCTMO had also known about the risks of using this material to cover the building, based on prior fire accidents that had taken place in establishments covered with ACM panels. Alcoa had been warned by their internal employees about the dangers of this material during a conference in Europe, some 10 years before the Grenfell fire. The authorities had been told about the possibility of similar accidents after a devastating fire killed 6 people at Lakanal House in Camberwell in 2009, 8 years before this tragedy. The residents council, which operated in the Grenfell Tower, had also written an article, addressed to the administration, mentioning the dangerous state the building was in, just 6 months before the tragic fire, but nothing had been done about it, other than the article being blacklisted from the online forum.
What ultimately happened to the people responsible for the tragedy?
Theresa May, the UK Prime Minister at the time in 2017, also appears in the Netflix documentary and talks about how the residents of Grenfell Tower were indeed treated like second-class citizens and how the authorities had failed them. Despite so much proof existing against the administration and the private companies that were involved in the matter, nothing substantial could be done against them. The official investigation into the horrific fire was concluded only in September of 2024, and the special inquiry team confirmed that the incident had been caused due to negligence and that it could have been easily avoided had the authorities been up to their task.
However, the inquiry team was only given the responsibility of determining what had happened, and they did not have the power to determine guilt. Therefore, no criminal procedure has been started against any of the authorities or companies, and although that is what the families of the victims have been demanding, it will be possible only after two or three years of further investigation, at least. The three private companies involved in the manufacturing and fitting of the ACM cladding panels on the building, Kingspan, Celotex, and Arconic, have been busy blaming one another, and they still claim that their respective products are safe to use. Briefly put, the situation still remains a mess, and the perpetrators continue to walk free, while films like Grenfell: Uncovered can only make efforts to keep the incident and the 72 victims fresh in the memories of people.
