Reconstruction of Grenfell Tower fire. Part 1: Lessons from observations and determination of work hypotheses

Abstract

SummaryThe Grenfell Tower fire occurred on 14 June 2017, killing 72 people. The pattern and speed of vertical and horizontal fire spread characterize this catastrophic event. Plentiful video and photographic data of the fire spread available has been carefully verified and concatenated into a database. The verified data have been superimposed on a projection of the Grenfell Tower in order to track the development of the fire. The surface that is unburnt, burning, or extinguished, as well as the presence of internal fire at any given location, is thus recorded for the duration of the fire. An analysis of the results showed that the initial vertical propagation can be divided into three phases. After the façade ignited at the fourth floor, vertical propagation over time is linear, with a vertical fire spread rate of around 3.5 m/min until the fire reached the sixth floor. Then fire propagation decelerated. Finally, fire spread accelerated with a power four dependence. The maximum vertical fire spread rate was around 8 m/min as the fire reached the crown at the top of the building. Horizontal spread proved to be greatest at the level of the crown (0.293 ± 0.005 m/min). There is a linear relationship between speed of horizontal fire spread and height. These correlations and observations yield important conclusions, and eight different hypotheses capable of explaining the global behaviour of the fire are suggested.