Grenfell Tower: search for the dead delayed amid fear of floors collapsing

Firefighters are unlikely to start a detailed search for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire until tomorrow or Sunday as they continue to shore up the inside of the building.

The core of the 24-storey block is secure but there is concern about the stability of internal structures, particularly on the higher floors.

Rescue crews have reached the top floor but have not been able to search individual flats. The search for bodies is expected to take at least three weeks.

As expectations of finding any survivors were lowered it was announced that sniffer dogs were being sent in as part of specialist urban search and rescue teams to help find the remains of victims.

A London Fire Brigade spokesman said: “We are having to build structures inside the block to make it safe to access. This will then enable us to start searching each of the flats fully which we have been unable to do so far.”

The future of the building will be decided by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea after a structural survey but it is expected that the tower will eventually be demolished.

Dany Cotton, the London fire commissioner, said: “Our specialist urban search and rescue crews are currently working to make the block safe so our firefighters can continue to progress throughout the building, making a detailed fingertip search for anyone who may still be inside.

“This will be a slow and painstaking process which will require a large amount of shoring-up work inside the building, especially on the upper floors, which will be the most challenging for us to access and search.

“I want to be realistic: we are likely to have crews working at the scene for many days to come. We do not yet know what caused the fire. We do not know where it started and we do not know why it spread in the way that it did.”

Had Grenfell Tower been built only a few years earlier, it might well already have disintegrated.

That it is still standing can perhaps be attributed to the stringent rules that were brought in after the collapse of another high-rise building, Ronan Point, in east London, after a gas explosion in 1968, causing the death of four people and injuring 17 others.

By the time Grenfell Tower was built in 1974, the regulations had been amended substantially to try to increase the chances of a building remaining upright in the event of a serious incident.

“The regulations in the UK are very stringent and focus on the protection of people,” Christopher Miers, an architect and expert witness on fire safety, said. “The risks are much lower than in other countries such as the United Arab Emirates, where there have been a number of blazes in tall buildings. Nonetheless, we need to understand how the fire spread.”

Even though London Fire Brigade said that a structural engineer had declared the building safe for the emergency services to operate in, Mr Miers said that Grenfell Tower would still need to be demolished eventually.

“Specialists will start to inspect the structure as soon as it’s cool enough, but the heat of the fire is likely to have damaged the concrete frame and it will probably be more economic to demolish it than rebuild it in the long run,” he said.

While the more stringent regulations introduced in 1971 as a result of Ronan Point may have kept the tower upright, there were concerns that regulations had failed to keep up with the latest developments in building materials and construction methods.

Aluminium composite cladding, of the sort installed at Grenfell Tower last year, has been linked to a number of big fires around the world in recent years, including eight in the skyscraper capital of Dubai and two in China.

“Building regulations only go so far and the problems with this system are well known and really need to be mitigated by whoever is installing it,” Matthew Needham-Laing, an architect and lawyer specialising in construction, said.

“The cladding causes fire to jump over the firebreaks and up the side of the building, rendering current building regulations moot, and the heat of a panel burning is enough to set other panels off.

“There are thousands of buildings in the UK which use this sort of cladding and must be considered at risk.”

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