LONDON
— Three officials involved with Grenfell Tower, the apartment building
where at least 80 people died on June 14, announced their resignations
on Friday, as the political fallout over Britain’s deadliest fire in decades intensified.
Nick
Paget-Brown, a Conservative, stepped down as head of the council of
Kensington and Chelsea, the wealthy London borough that owns the tower,
on Friday afternoon. Rock Feilding-Mellen, a Conservative who had been
in charge of housing for the council, stepped down as deputy leader.
Hours
earlier, Robert Black, the head of the management company that ran the
24-story building and oversaw a renovation that included the
installation of flammable cladding,
also resigned. The resignations occurred as new evidence emerged that
the management company, which started the renovation in 2014, had chosen
a less fire-resistant form of cladding to save nearly 300,000 pounds.
The fire, which left hundreds of people homeless, has opened debates over inequality, deregulation, austerity
and governance. It is the subject of a public inquiry, led by a retired
judge, as well as a criminal investigation. And it has cost several
people their jobs, including the council’s chief executive, Nicholas
Holgate, who was forced out shortly after the fire.
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Mr. Paget-Brown faced numerous calls for his resignation after a council meeting he led on Thursday ended in mayhem and acrimony
when he tried to exclude reporters, saying that their presence might
“prejudice” a government inquiry into the tragedy. The journalists had
obtained a court order admitting them to the meeting.
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A Lethal Wrapping
The building was recently renovated. New insulation and
cladding were installed on the exterior; both contained flammable
materials.
SPREADING OF FIRE
CREATING A CHIMNEY EFFECT
CAVITY
CLADDING
PANELS WITH
PLASTIC CORE
OLD WALL
INSULATION
OLD WALL
CAVITY,
ABOUT
2 INCHES
AIR
Radiant heat from the burning cladding and
insulation, combined with air rushing through the gap, increased the
intensity of the fire.
Flammable cladding and insulation enabled the fire to spread rapidly on the exterior of the building.
Mr.
Paget-Brown’s effort to block the reporters drew a rebuke from Prime
Minister Theresa May, who had already seized control of the emergency
response from the council, which was faulted for a lackluster handling
of the tragedy. “The High Court ruled that the meeting should be open,
and we would have expected the council to respect that,” her office said
in a statement on Friday.
In
a statement, Mr. Paget-Brown said he only tried to block the
journalists because he had received advice from lawyers not to discuss
the fire in public. “As council leader I have to accept my share of
responsibility for these perceived failings,” he said, adding that “it
cannot be right that this should have become the focus of attention when
so many are dead or still unaccounted for.”
Mr. Paget-Brown indicated that he would remain a councilor — a position to which he was first elected in 1986
— but would step aside as leader. Mr. Feilding-Mellen, who was first
elected in 2006, also said he would remain on the council, though he
resigned as deputy leader.
Kensington
and Chelsea is one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, but it also
contains large sections of housing built for people of modest means.
Many residents have for years accused the council of allowing
penny-pinching to override fire safety when the building undertook the
renovation, which was completed last year.
The
government is racing to test cladding on high-rise buildings across the
country. As of Friday, 149 buildings in 45 areas had failed fire-safety
tests, officials said.
The Times of London, citing leaked emails and meeting minutes, reported on Friday
that Artelia UK, the project management consultants overseeing the
refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, had come under pressure to reduce
costs.
Interactive Feature
Escaping the Inferno
Britain’s deadliest fire in more than a century raced
from floor to floor, forcing residents to decide: Wait for rescuers or
try to escape?
One
email from the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization to
Artelia discussed several options for slashing cladding costs and
suggested that using cheaper aluminum composite panels, rather than
panels made of zinc, could yield a “saving of £293,368,” about $380,000.
The
BBC, which also cited documents it had obtained, reported that the
money saved by using aluminum “cladding in lieu of zinc cladding” was
part of a broader package of savings that brought down the total cost of
the project to about £8.5 million from about £9.2 million.
Brian Meacham,
an associate professor of fire engineering at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute in Massachusetts, said that in general, the more expensive
zinc cladding may have been less combustible because it has a less
flammable insulation — some of it made of mineral wool fiber — than the
aluminum composite cladding.
Grenfell
Tower, which opened in 1974, is owned by the Royal Borough of
Kensington and Chelsea but is managed by the quasi-public management
organization. Mr. Black said that he wished to focus on “assisting with
the investigation and inquiry.”
On
Thursday evening, after Mr. Paget-Brown was forced to relent from his
opposition to admitting journalists, he prematurely ended the meeting
after 20 minutes — earning him swift criticism from Mayor Sadiq Khan of
London and from Sajid Javid, the secretary for communities and local
government, who called for greater transparency.
The council’s top Labour leader, Robert Atkinson, called the way the meeting was handled “an absolute fiasco” and urged Mr. Paget-Brown to resign, according to a video
of the proceedings published in the British news media. He also
suggested that the Conservatives, a majority on the council, were trying
to obfuscate the reality of what had happened at the tower block.
This
week, the government appointed Martin Moore-Bick, a retired appellate
judge with a background in commercial law, to lead the public inquiry
into the disaster. Mrs. May told members of Parliament that the
investigation would “leave no stone unturned.”
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