Grenfell Tower Death Toll Rises to 17; U.K. Government Is Criticized

Among the key questions confronting investigators and government officials: Did a policy of telling people to remain in their apartments until firefighters arrived put residents in danger? What role did exterior cladding, installed as part of a renovation completed last year, play in the rapid spread of the flames? And should older buildings — Grenfell Tower was completed in 1974 — have to be retrofitted with sprinklers and alarm systems?

Residents said an exploding appliance caused the fire, but officials have not verified that account.

Mrs. May announced the inquiry shortly after the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, asked for one, and as questions arose about the role of Gavin Barwell, who was housing minister until last week. (He lost his bid for re-election to Parliament, and is now Mrs. May’s chief of staff.)

Critics say a much-needed review of fire safety regulations languished under Mr. Barwell’s watch. The review was demanded after a deadly fire at an apartment building in Camberwell, in southeast London, in 2009.

A residents’ association, the Grenfell Action Group, had complained for years that concerns about fire hazards in Grenfell Tower were ignored by the building’s owner — the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea — and by the company the borough council hired to manage it.

Survivors said they first learned their lives were in danger through word of mouth. They described harrowing scenes, including at least one child thrown from a window who landed safely in the arms of a man below.

“The only alarm that went off was my neighbor’s smoke alarm,” said Eddie Daffarn, a 16th-floor resident and member of the Grenfell Action Group. “I thought he had burned some chips. I opened the door and there was smoke, loads of smoke, so then I closed it and thought: This is a real fire, not my mate’s chip pan.”

He said a friend on the fifth floor phoned him and urged him to run. “I wrapped a towel around me and opened the door,” Mr. Daffarn recalled. “The smoke was so thick and heavy, I couldn’t see anything. I thought: ‘This is me, I’m a goner.’ ” He finally descended and was helped by a firefighter.

Mrs. May, already under pressure after a series of terrorist attacks and political setbacks in the election last week, visited the scene on Thursday. So did the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who said in a statement: “There are thousands of tower blocks around our country. Every single person living in one today will be frightened.”

As the government tried to reassure anxious citizens, the policing and fire minister, Nick Hurd, said there was “no room for cool plodding bureaucracy” as the inquiry gets underway. The housing minister, Alok Sharma, promised help for displaced families.

Critics were not assuaged. David Lammy, a Labour lawmaker representing Tottenham, in northeast London, called the fire “corporate manslaughter” and demanded a criminal investigation.

“Those ‘70s buildings, many of them should be demolished,” he said. “They have not got easy fire escapes. They have got no sprinklers. It is totally, totally unacceptable in Britain that this is allowed to happen and that people lose their lives in this way.”

Mark Hardingham, an official at the National Fire Chiefs Council, which represents Britain’s firefighters, said he expected the inquiry to reassess the so-called stay put policy and regulations covering sprinkler systems and alarms.

“The fire was truly an exceptional fire, the likes of which I haven’t seen in 26 years, and that has to be beared in mind,” he said.

The exterior cladding added in 2016 will also be a focus. Matthew Needham-Laing, an architect and engineering lawyer who specializes in building defects, said the dark smoke that had engulfed the building was a telltale sign.

“It looks to me like a cladding fire,” he said in an interview, echoing assessments by other experts. He added that the material is “flame retardant, so it doesn’t catch fire as easily, but the temperatures you’re talking about are often 900, 1,000 degrees centigrade, and in those conditions, any material will generally burn.”

After the Camberwell fire in 2009, which killed six people, a parliamentary group called for a review of fire safety rules, and an inquest advised the government to require that older buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers. That did not happen.

An inquest after the 2009 fire concluded that residents followed the stay put advice 30 minutes longer than they should have.

“If you have good fire resistance between flats, there is less risk if you stay in place than if everyone runs out of the building at the same time,” Sian Berry, chairwoman of the Housing Committee of the London Assembly, said in an interview. “But this shouldn’t be applied in a hard and fast manner.”

Ms. Berry said central fire alarm systems were not required for residential buildings because, to be effective, such systems must be monitored constantly. Grenfell Tower did not have one. Instead, individual apartments were fitted with smoke detectors.

The building also lacked a sprinkler system; sprinklers were not required in buildings built before 2006.

In an interview, BrianMeacham, associate professor of fire protection engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, said that European fire codes tended to rely more on fire-resistant construction, while American building codes typically are more likely to require active measures like sprinkler systems.

“The British approach works well when the passive fire protection works well,” he said, “but if you have a problem with the firewalls or the doors, or a fire spreads externally, and the passive protection is lost, you have limited options.”

He said most building codes in the United States require two separate routes of escape from every floor, in case one becomes blocked or overcrowded. In Britain, experts said, only one escape route is typically required. Grenfell Tower had a single staircase linking all floors of the building.

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