It's been nearly a year since the fire at the Grenfell Tower apartment building in west London killed 72 people, and there are still a lot of things we don't know.
We know that the fire broke out around midnight on June 14, 2017, and that it quickly engulfed the entire building. But we don't know why the builders chose highly flammable cladding material when they refurbished the tower. We don't know why the residents' safety concerns were ignored for years, or why the firefighters who showed up that night were painfully ill-equipped to handle the inferno.
This week, a public inquiry will consider these and other questions. Led by a retired judge, it will try to parse what happened at Grenfell Tower, why it did and how to make sure it never happens again. The judge will hear evidence, including testimony from hundreds of survivors, families and friends. Experts on fire safety will also speak.
Once they're finished, there will be hearings on the underlying causes of the fire. Separately, London's Metropolitan Police are investigating possible criminal offenses.
Scores of survivors have signed up to participate. Many say they're looking for answers and want to have their voices heard. "I want justice for everyone," survivor Natasha Elcock told Parliament in a special session earlier this year. Here are key questions about the blaze:
What is Grenfell Tower?
The building was built in 1974 by the local government, the Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council. It was born as public housing and is still owned by the council, but it was managed by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenants Management Organization, a nonprofit.
The building, located in one of London's toniest neighborhoods, housed low-income families, including new immigrants. Among the victims of the fire were Syrian refugees, artists and retirees.
How did the fire start?
The fire was started by a refrigerator in a fourth-floor apartment. "My fridge blew up," the tenant allegedly yelled as he ran from apartment to apartment, knocking on doors and warning people to get out. It should have been easily contained. Instead, the fire spread quickly up the building's flammable cladding before engulfing the entire tower.
Mourners embrace as they leave the Grenfell Tower National Memorial service. (Daniel Leavl-Olivas/Getty Images)
Were there concerns about building safety before the fire?
This week's public inquiry will try to answer that question. Here's what we do know:
The tower's tenants' association had raised concerns about fire safety with management several times in the year before the fire. According to the Grenfell Action Group, an advocacy group for local residents, tenants warned both during and after the refurbishment that it would be hard for emergency vehicles to access the building. In 2013, they said that the building's fire extinguishers hadn't been tested in more than a year. They also complained that the 2014 refurbishment left the tower with just one staircase and exit, which management did not keep clear.
Six months before the blaze, members of the residents' association wrote on their blog: "It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord ... and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders."
Survivor Ahmed Elgwahry said he and others had been treated like "second-class citizens" when they raised their concerns about the building.
Why was the building so flammable?
Some say the fire spread quickly because of the cladding on the outside. They believe officials selected cheap cladding even though they knew it was dangerous. The Times of London obtained leaked emails and meeting minutes from 2014 showing that the building's project managers were pressured to cut costs during the refurbishment. In one note, they discussed efforts to cut down on cladding costs. They proposed using aluminum cladding, rather than zinc, to save about $380,000. Zinc is much less flammable.
Were there other reasons so many people died?
Critics say the city's emergency response was lacking. More than 200 firefighters responded to the call, but they were hampered by low water pressure, radio problems and bad equipment. As a result, they were able to reach only the 12th floor of the building. (The building had 24 floors in total.)
Where are the surviving families now?
More than 200 families were displaced by the fire. Nearly a year later, the majority are still living in hotels or other temporary accommodations. Another 100 families from a nearby building that was also damaged in the fire are still without permanent homes, as well.
Officials say they've spent about $280 million on new housing for the displaced families, including $30 million on hotel bills between June and February. But the families say the housing they're being offered is inadequate. "We kept saying we didn’t want to live higher than the third floor or in a large tower block because of the trauma we went through," said Asma Kazmi, a mother of three who survived the fire, to the New York Times. "For seven months, they showed us flats on high-up floors in big tower blocks."
Eventually, an exasperated Kazmi accepted temporary housing.
Is it possible that other public housing projects might also be vulnerable?
Almost certainly.
When the management organization refurbished the tower in 2014 an effort to create more apartments, it eliminated all but one of the building's staircases and emergency exits. It also installed the new, more flammable cladding in what Feargus O'Sullivan of CityLab said was "typical of an approach that seeks to superficially improve a building’s appearance to make it more marketable to private tenants, while neglecting more important structural deficiencies not immediately visible to the casual viewer."
Those two changes, Sullivan wrote, were fundamental in causing the disaster. "If Grenfell Tower hadn’t been rearranged to create more apartments and re-clad to make it look newer, there’s a good chance it would still be standing intact," he said.
Why is Britain's public housing in such bad shape?
Britain was once a model of successful public-housing projects. In 1890, the government passed a law giving municipalities the legal power to build public housing. In the decades after, millions of new units were built. By 1979, 42 percent of the country lived in what it called council housing.
That changed when Margaret Thatcher came to power. Thatcher pushed an idea called "Right to Buy," which allowed public-housing renters to buy their own units and then sell them on the private market. This decimated the country's public-housing supply and created a stigma around the very idea of government housing. "People wanted to think of themselves as being self-sufficient units. They didn’t want to think of themselves as having a kind of reliance on the state," author Lynsey Hanley explained in "Estates." "It became a fundamental plank of the kind of 'British values' culture."
Between 1979 and 2013, about a third of all council homes were privatized. At the same time, government funding for public housing plummeted. As a result, the public housing stock that does exist fell into disrepair.
That helps explain what happened in Grenfell. But it's far from the only unit facing those problems. Consider this: A 2011 report found that three-quarters of Britain's public housing blocks were unsafe in a fire.
In other words, another Grenfell could happen again. Without proper care, it almost certainly will.
