Burnt Offering (2)
Controlled Burn, Part Two of Two
“Once it was clear that the fire was out of control and that compartmentation had failed, a decision should have been taken to organise the evacuation of the tower while that remained possible. That decision could and should have been made between 01.30 and 01.50 and would be likely to have resulted in fewer fatalities. The best part of an hour was lost before AC [Assistant Commissioner] Roe revoked the ‘stay put’ advice.”1
-Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1 Report Executive Summary
Not among the dead were those who built Grenfell Tower to be a pyre. Not among the dead were those who made the conflagration possible through a carefully constructed web of profit-driven policies, discriminatory regulations, and orchestrated negligence. Not among the dead was the dense affluence that surrounded the tower. Not among the dead were the better-to-do who slept soundly in Grenfell’s vicinities when the fire irrupted. Not among the dead was a society peopled with complicity.
The immediate cause of the fire was a faulty refrigerator-freezer unit, the Hotpoint FF175BP, manufactured by Whirlpool, an American multinational corporation.2 While an investigation of the model revealed that “the product met legal safety requirements and that the risk associated with the model is assessed as low,” what policies, interests, and influences were at play in the setting and maintaining of these standards? The independent consumer group Which? had questioned those standards, especially with respect to plastic backed refrigerator units like the Hotpoint FF15BP.3
The cause of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, however, cannot be solely pinned to the electrical fault that ignited the fire itself. It concerns a history of neglect, avarice, and marginalization meticulously set into place and diligently maintained at a structural level of society. Grenfell was a tower built without a sprinkler system and with only a single stairwell to bind together all of its 24 floors. An incongruent “stay put” policy, enforced by the Kensington & Chelsea Tenant Management Organization and the London Fire Brigade, promised death by asphyxiation or immolation to the building’s rules-bound denizens.4 The tower’s exterior façade, which illuminated the skyline on that terrible night, was selected irresponsibly, having been downgraded for cost-saving reasons.5 Its firefighting equipment was overdue for inspection. Its extinguishers were expired. Its gas line was poorly maintained. Its electrical system was prone to hazardous, intermittent surges.6 The building’s accessibility was severely limited. Its maintenance was continually deferred or haphazardly mended. Its integrity was willfully ignored and left to split and crack like so much kindling.
As a result of so many structurally precipitated disparities, at least seventy-two people lost their lives in a horrifically long night. At least seventy-two people were devoured by the flaming maw of the tower. At least seventy-two people were executed by the constellation of actions and inactions of the “good society” corralling them there. As for the rest of the survivors, they were suddenly displaced. Few stories would follow them after the blaze.
Let me be clear: The fire at Grenfell Tower was not an accident. A disturbing array of immoral choices and questionable, if not outright malicious, actions feed that conflagration. As legal scholar Nadine El-Nany discloses:
“The Grenfell fire embodies a double meaning of atrocity. It was not only a sudden, terrifying occurrence, its roots lie in slow violence. Slow, or structural, violence is more difficult to identify than the sudden violent spectacle. Yet, in the case of the Grenfell fire, the violence and disintegration that preceded the horrifying spectacle of the fire was perceptible. It was perceptible to its eventual victims and survivors, but they and their calls for help in making their home safe were marginalised, silenced and ignored until it was too late.”7
The fire was the natural consequence of a series of accumulating, interlocking, mutually-reinforcing decisions made at different levels and by different segments of society across a long span of history. Scholars and community organizers like El-Nany, Bulley, Becka Hudson, and Pilgrim Tucker, among others, have documented the concentric circles of culpability behind these decisions.8 These were decisions made for the benefit of some, but not others. It aided those beneficiaries financially, politically, socially, and psychologically, both directly and indirectly. It did so at the cost of socially-devalued others.
In the immediate aftermath of the blaze, the Metropolitan Police Service undertook its largest investigative operations outside of its ongoing counter-terrorism ones.9 Yet two years after the fire, the British government reported that more than two hundred residential buildings with the same aluminum composite material (AMC) cladding as that of Grenfell Tower had not begun remediation work with scores more still not having completed its removal.10 Indeed, attesting to the society-spanning complicity that went into the destruction of Grenfell Tower are the many fires that preceded it and continue to follow it: Harrow Court in Stevenage (February 2, 2005), Lakanal House in Camberwell, London (July 3, 2009), Shirley Towers in Southampton (April 6, 2010), Shepherd’s Court in Shepherd’s Bush, London (August 19, 2016), Coolmoyne House in Belfast (November 24, 2017), Samuel Garside House in Barking, London (June 9, 2019) Limehouse Lodge in Clapton, London (September 16, 2019), The Cube in Bolton (November 15, 2019), to name but a few.11 On 9 January 2022, across the Atlantic in the Bronx, a borough of New York City, a fire cut from the same flame tore through the 19-story high rise housing development Twin Peaks North West, killing 17, eight of whom were children.12 Colloquially called Touray Tower, many of its residents were immigrants from West Africa, the Gambia especially. Running concurrently behind the veneer of public grief, dismay, and outrage that erupts in the face of each of these losses is the structural machinery of that same society, which dutifully and reliably continues to manufacture these burnt offerings to the prevailing social order. In this way, the Grenfell Tower fire was more akin to a controlled detonation than a tragedy of chance. It was like a backfire, purposefully lit in the underbrush so that the greater forest of the status quo would stay safeguarded from more devastating and uncontainable wildfires. The fire was a society’s act of self-preservation.
As for those displaced souls, those who had fled to these metropolises from far afield, they were allowed to be set ablaze so that “good society” – those within the house, so to speak – could live comfortably and blithely on. This house is nothing less than the House of Pharaoh. The House of Pharaoh… become an enemy and a sorrow to them. Pharaoh, Haman, and their hosts were wrongdoers (Q. 28:8). It is the House of Pharaoh that is so skilled at building towers that become tombs. It is the House of Pharaoh that is so adept at marginalizing, subjugating, disenfranchising, and displacing others. It is the House of Pharaoh that is so well-versed in rendering its actions as legible, licit, and even vital. And it is most certainly a house that is being named, rather than an individual, because it entails the building of walls, establishing barriers to entry, ensuring sufficient standards of security, and protecting those within the house, “good society,” from the dangers beyond its confines. It is a house that is being named because the scale of such oppression can never be the work of one person.
Systemic evil implicates us all.
The House of Pharaoh is a house in which we all abide. We are that society peopled by complicity.
Burnt Offering (1): The Fire Inside, Part One of Two
Martin Moore-Bick, Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 1 Report Overview – Report of the Public Inquiry into the Fire at Grenfell Tower on 14 June 2017 (Crown, October 2019), 6. https://www.grenfelltowerinquiry.org.uk/phase-1-report
“Latest: Grenfell Tower fire investigation,” Metropolitan Police News, September 19, 2017, http://news.met.police.uk/news/latest-grenfell-tower-fire-investigation-250453. Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20180620052605/http://news.met.police.uk/news/latest-grenfell-tower-fire-investigation-250453.
“Grenfell Tower: Safety clearance for fridge-freezer model,” BBC News, May 15, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44125844.
“Police probing fire service over Grenfell Tower disaster,” BBC News, June 7, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44396757.
Robert Booth, “Grenfell Tower: insulation was not certified for use with flammable cladding,” The Guardian, July 13, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jul/13/grenfell-tower-building-control-warned-about-refit-insulation-plan.
Tenants of Grenfell Tower reported that the building had a history of power surges, spanning at least four years, which caused appliances to smoke and become damaged. Andrew Hosken, “Electricity problems at Grenfell Tower ‘never resolved,’” BBC News, July 18, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40632705.
Nadine El-Nany, “Before Grenfell: British Immigration Law and the Production of Colonial Spaces,” in After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 51.
While all the contributions to After Grenfell address this subject see especially: Dan Bulley, “Everyday Life and Death in the Global City” in After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 1-18; Radical Housing Network, Becka Hudson and Pilgrim Tucker, “Struggles for Social Housing Justice,” in After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response, edited by Dan Bulley, Jenny Edkins and Nadine El-Enany (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 62-74.
“Latest: Grenfell Tower fire investigation,” Metropolitan Police News, September 19, 2017, http://news.met.police.uk/news/latest-grenfell-tower-fire-investigation-250453.
Benjamin Kentish, “Government warned of another Grenfell-type disaster as 60,000 people still living in buildings covered in same flammable material,” The Independent, June 5, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/grenfell-tower-fire-material-high-rise-buildings-flat-block-a8946276.html; Daniel Wainwright, “Grenfell Tower: Hundreds of buildings still have ‘unsafe’ cladding,” The Guardian, June 14, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-48609595; Luke Barratt, “We’re two years on from Grenfell, so why do these fires keep happening?,” The Guardian, November 19, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/19/grenfell-fires-cladding-safety-building-owners.
Sian Davies, “Misadventure verdict on deaths of firefighters Alan Bannon and Jim Shears at Shirley Towers inquest,” Southern Daily Echo, July 10, 2012, https://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/9808663.misadventure-verdict-on-deaths-of-firefighters-alan-bannon-and-jim-shears-at-shirley-towers-inquest/; Peter Walker, “Lakanal House tower bloc fire: deaths ‘could have been prevented,’’ The Guardian, March 28, 2013,https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/28/lakanal-house-fire-deaths-prevented; Andrew Hosken, “Fire brigade rasied fears about cladding with councils,” BBC News, June 28, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-40422922; Louise McEvoy, “Grenfell Tower: Fatal fire at Stevenage’s Harrow Court foretold the tragedy,” The Comet, October 30, 2018,https://www.thecomet.net/news/fatal-fires-that-foretold-grenfell-focuses-on-stevenage-s-harrow-court-1-5757589; Inside Housing Reporters, “Warning signs: a timeline of major residential fires post-Grenfell,” Inside Housing, November 18, 2019, https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/warning-signs-a-timeline-of-major-residential-fires-post-grenfell-64191.
Karen Zraick, Anne Barnard, & Lola Fadulu, “The Bronx Fire Victims: Passionate Students and Hardworking Parents,” New York Times, January 17, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/us/bronx-fire-victims.html.
Beautiful and powerful as always. But what are we to do when we recognize we are in the house of Pharoah and are all complicit? Is there a part 3 here? Perhaps a tafsir of what the wife of Pharoah offers us as a model of what it means to maintain integrity and righteousness even when we are intimately part of and complicit within an oppressive system we cannot dismantle?
I am going to link to your post in the one I'm writing, which discusses the attitude that makes this and other tragedies possible.
Thanks for posting this, Martin.