RedHanded - Episode 302 - Grenfell Tower

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

On 14th June 2017, a fire engulfed Grenfell Tower, a high-rise residential building in West London. 74 people died, and the tragedy became one of the darkest days in recent British history.But worst of all, the incident was completely avoidable. This is the story of how decades of government corruption and unbelievable corporate greed killed so many innocent people.As part of our coverage of the Grenfell case, and to support those still affected today - we’re going to be donating a portion of our ad revenue from this episode to the Grenfell Foundation. If you’d like to find out more about the Grenfell Foundation please follow this link: https://www.grenfellfoundation.org.uk/fundraisingFollow us on social media:InstagramTwitterVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti.

And welcome to Red Handed, a timely one, One we've been thinking about doing for a while but felt like we had to do it at the appropriate time. And this is that time. It is that time because if you are listening to this as a beloved patron on Wednesday the 14th of June, then it will be the six year anniversary to the day of the horrific tragedy that we are about to discuss. If you're listening to it on the 15th, do the maths. Yeah. It's bad times. It's bad times.

Today we're going to get very enraged on this podcast. When I was, you know, reading through the script for this and going over the details of it, God, I just found myself, and I said this at the podcast show when we were talking about this episode i found myself just like my eyes were just pouring with tears because it is so senseless this was just down to absolute sheer stupidity on the part of the authorities and just an absolute callous disregard for human life and it is so infuriating because, spoilers, not one single person had to die in this case. But we're going to get to it. If you feel like that episode was quite heavy, guys, I'm not feeling particularly great about it after, don't worry.

Because if you take yourself over to Amazon Music right now, then you can listen to this week's shorthand, which came out on Tuesday, which is on, does Megalodon still exist? And it is some of my finest work, I think. Yeah, it's just through being like, I love sharks. Sharks are really great. They're my favourite for 25 minutes. It is. And if you think sharks are the best, and you are really interested to learn loads of facts about them, and also find out why Megalodon, sorry, definitely doesn't still exist, but you want to know more about those fucking killer whales that are knocking boats over in Gibraltar, go on over and listen to this week's Shorthand. But now, I'm afraid, we do have to get

on with it. At 12.54am on the 14th of June 2017, emergency services received a phone call from Behalu Kibedi. He was one of 600 residents who called Grenfell Tower home. Grenfell was, and still is, a 24-storey block of flats on Latimer Road in Kensington, West London. You can see it very clearly from the Eastern Road. Mr Kibedi had been woken up by his smoke alarm, only to find that a fire had started in his kitchen. Like many similar tower blocks in the UK, Grenfell operated under what's known as a stay-put policy in case of fire. The idea was that if a fire was to break out in one flat, then the thick walls and fire doors would be sufficient enough to contain the flames and prevent them from spreading until the fire services arrived. But as the

residents of Grenfell were about to find out that June, this just couldn't have been any further from the truth. Mr. Kabady's flat was on the fourth floor and within just 30 minutes the flames had spread all the way to the 24th. The building burned for more than 24 hours. In that time, 72 residents, including 18 children, were killed in the flames and poisonous smoke. Two later died in hospital, and more than 74 were injured. What happened that day was the deadliest residential fire in the UK since the Second Great Fire of London during World War II. And this time, it wasn't Nazi bombs that brought the death and destruction. It was criminal negligence, corruption, corporate greed, classism, racism, and a near psychopathic disregard for human life by a government that

failed in its duty to protect its citizens. But before we get to all of that, for now, let's stick with the night of the tragedy. As we said, Mr. Kabedi, a flat 16 on the fourth floor, reported the fire had started in his kitchen just before 1am. And importantly, Mr. Kabedi was not to blame for this fire. It was caused because of a malfunction in his large fridge freezer. Which could happen to anyone at any time. So after phoning 999, Mr. Kabibedi then alerted his flatmates and nearby neighbours by banging on their doors. Within six minutes, two fire engines had arrived at the scene

and two more arrived shortly afterwards. At this point, the fire could be seen as a glow coming from Mr. Kibedi's kitchen window. Other residents were instructed to stay put, as it was standard for each and every flat to be fireproofed from its neighbours. It was also because of this policy that Grenfell Tower had no central fire alarm. Within 15 minutes of the fire engine's arrival, at 1.15am, firefighters noticed smoke pouring out of Flat 26, directly above Mr. Kabedi's flat, Flat 16. They could not understand why at the time, but they could see that the fire was climbing up the side of the building at a terrifying rate. The reason why the fire was able to climb up the side of the building so quickly, or at all, was due to the recently fitted cladding system, also known as a rain screen. This made the building a literal death trap.

The entire exterior of Grenfell Tower was covered in combustible insulation foam, along with combustible and extremely flammable cladding panels. And exacerbating both of those things, there was an air gap between them, which created a chimney effect, which meant that instead of keeping flames where they were, they were whisked upwards. Not only was the insulation foam extremely flammable, but it also created toxic smoke when it burned, a mix of carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, irritant acid gases, and cyanide. As for the cladding panels, they were made of two thin sheets of aluminium, held together by a plastic core of polyethylene. And polyethylene,

if you couldn't guess by the name, is made from petrol. And you did hear that right, petrol, what you might call in the States gasoline, the thing that you use in combustion engines, combustion being the operative word. And even worse than that, as a solid, polyethylene is denser and even more combustible than it is in his liquid form that you put in your car. So that meant that Grenfell Tower was coated top to bottom in fuel. I mean, I just don't even know what to say. It was basically just a building made out of petrol with a chimney effect.

And it's huge. And also when it burns, not only does it burn incredibly quickly because it is combustible, it releases fucking cyanide into the air. And if you are not British, you might not know, I don't feel like this was very widely reported globally. Grenfell Tower is just that, is a tower. It's an enormous building. It's, I don't know if we can call it a skyscraper, but it is very large. It's a high rise. So by 1.18am, just 34

of the almost 300 residents in the building had escaped. The fire was now climbing up the side of Grenfell Tower at a rate of a floor a minute. The flames ripped their way along the combustible cladding and as the windows shattered under the intense heat the fire burst into each flat along the way. And this was all a disaster that had been 40 years in the making and it was completely impossible to stop. But firefighters who were at the scene remember they arrived within minutes of the 999 call being placed,

but they still weren't evacuating the building. Why? Well, they were following the stay-put policy, the only one that they had been trained for. Their training never mentioned when to abandon this policy, and it certainly didn't involve knowing how to evacuate a high-rise. So let's talk about this policy, the stay-put policy. So what is the rationale of it? Well, like Hannah said at the start,

a big part of it depends on the idea that the building is fireproof from the inside, so if a fire breaks out in one flat, it can't just spread into another flat that easily. It's also based on the idea that if people are running out in one flat, it can't just spread into another flat that easily. It's also based on the idea that if people are running out of their flats, it makes A, locating people in the building a lot harder, and B, people may end up blocking the stairwells, putting other residents in danger and preventing firefighters moving up and down the stairs quickly and more safely. So it makes sense as a policy. But the stay put policy only works if all of the other elements to that theory are also in place, like the idea that the flats are fucking

fire safe. And some other things that we will go on to discover. And we will also go on to discover that in the case of Grenfell, they most certainly were not there. So yes, as the residents of Grenfell were being told to stay in their flats, the stairwells at this point were still fairly clear of smoke. And according to an expert witness, it would have taken just around seven minutes to safely evacuate all 293 residents. At 1.21am, emergency services received their first call from a resident in the building other than Mr Kibedi. A woman on the 22nd floor phoned to tell them that she could smell smoke. The fire had started on the 4th floor.

So in 25 minutes, despite the presence of a fire brigade, the fire was spreading upwards. That resident was told to shut her door and stay put. And this is the thing. If you are saying that within 25 minutes of that first call being placed from Mr. Kibedi, in 25 minutes is already on the 22nd floor from the fourth floor. And firefighters were there within minutes and they can see it spreading up the building they should now know that this idea that the building is fire safe and the fire can't spread beyond the flat it starts in is clearly not the case and I'm not placing blame on like one individual person there or even the fire crew that were there nobody wanted this to happen

but it's just the incredible oversight the incredible lack of planning or the incredible lack of like any kind of thoroughness that would have told people hey look these things that needed to be in place for stay put to work are clearly not in place maybe we should fucking do something it's just the classic thing of like well I was just doing what I was told to do. Yeah. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life.

I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen

with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Just a few minutes after the emergency services received that phone call from the lady on the 22nd floor, in the words of one of the emergency operators, all hell broke loose.

In the two minutes between 1.24am and 1.26am, the number of calls rose from 9 to 17. And by 1.30am, there had been 29 calls to emergency services. And every single terrified person who phoned 999 was told to stay in their flat. Now, many residents in a state of total panic did actually get out of the building after seeing flames breaking in through their kitchen windows. But so many others, through no fault of their own, followed the expert advice of the emergency services and did as they were told, thinking that they would be safe. Which you would. Like, nobody calls 999 because it's not 111. You know, like like no one's like

oh I'll just check that you do what they say oh 100% and this is the thing the people in the flats the people who died in the tower did everything they were told to believing that they were safe

believing that they didn't want to put other people in danger by going onto the stairwells or whatever the case might be believing that somebody was going to come for them. And nobody came. Five residents from the upper floors jumped into the lift because it was inexplicably in the midst of a raging fire, still in service. But horrifically, when it reached the 10th floor, the lift suddenly stopped and the doors opened. Black smoke flooded the lift, choking and blinding the would-be escapees.

Those five people are believed to be the first fatalities of the Grenfell fire. It's like a haunted house. Yeah. It's like the building is possessed and trying to kill as many people as it possibly can. But no, it's just down to raging governmental incompetence. So now this poisonous smoke began filling the lobbies of each floor and made its way into the one and only stairwell of Grenfell Tower. And there's another reason that the fire spread so quickly, other than, you know, all of the other factors that we've already mentioned.

Every front door in Grenfell was supposed to have a fire door with a self-closing mechanism to contain fires in the flat they start in. But a later investigation into the nightmare that was this situation found that 43 fire doors didn't have these self-closers installed. And the 34 that did have them, well guess what?

They weren't even fucking working. So as people fled for their lives, their doors were left open and the smoke from the fires inside flooded out into the hallways. The doors to the stairwell were also kept open by firefighters for their hoses because they still believed they could extinguish the fire but they can't extinguish the fire because the building is made of petrol. But by 1.30am the fire had climbed up 20 floors and had reached the roof and the tower's architectural crown. And that's not a metaphor.

The building had literally been fitted with a giant decorative crown in 2012. It was purely for aesthetic purposes, but guess what? It was made out of the same flammable cladding material as the rest of the fucking building. For the Olympics, one would assume, because when you're driving from the airport, you do drive right past Grenfell. Yeah. So it's like, let's not, you know, bother to do basic health and safety checks, like do the doors work? You know, is the building covered in petrol, etc, etc. Let's stick an

incredibly flammable, poisonous, decorative crown on the roof of this building just so you know people who are coming to the uk for the olympics aren't offended by looking at low-income housing yeah fuck you so hard so when the fire reached the roof and this crown in the words of one expert witness when the flames reached it quote it hit a fuse, the fire, which had been creeping up only one side of the building, began to descend down the other three sides. Between 1.30am and 1.40am, 36 people escaped the building by way of the stairs. The smoke in the stairwell was still not as bad as the dense black smoke pouring through the lobbies. By 1.50am, 22 fire engines had arrived at the scene, bringing with them 114 firefighters.

The situation was now way worse than anything London had seen in the Blitz. But still, emergency services continued to advise residents waiting in their flats to stay put, to put towels at the bottom of their doors and wait to be rescued. I just can't cope. I don't know what I would do if that's what 999 were telling me to do. And there's black smoke in the car. I genuinely don't know what I would do. I mean, I think I put myself too much in the position of what was going on when we were like, when I was looking at the script of this, and it was just, it's the horror. Imagine being stuck on like some crazy high floor of this building and being told repeatedly, stay put, stay put, stay put. But at this point, if you are in any of the flats, if the fire is

descending down all four sides of this building you can see it you can see the fire and we know that people die of smoke inhalation before they're burned and in this case the smoke is literally made of cyanide i just don't even know at what point do you decide to stop listening to expert advice and at that point you're like am i putting my family in more risk people are also taught if you open doors you can create that backdraft which can then create an explosive fireball like I don't know what I would do honestly I don't know I would probably have stayed put until I decide fuck this and at that point as we're going to find out it was far too late for too many people to escape. We should also tell you that the emergency call operators in the Stratford control room, which is where the Grenfell Tower calls were being directed to,

hadn't seen a single image of what was actually happening at Grenfell. And for non-Londoners, Stratford is the other side of the city. It's miles. But they hadn't seen anything because the TV in the Stratford office, which usually had 24-hour rolling news, wasn't working that day. So the operators had absolutely no idea of the disaster that was unfolding. So they continued to underplay the severity of the situation to trapped residents who were desperately phoning them.

People trapped on the 23rd floor in a flat that was filling with thick smoke were advised to keep calm and await the firefighters. But the firefighters. But the firefighters were never going to make it. Some operators even told these residents that the fire was only on the fourth floor, when in fact, as we said, it was already on the roof by this point. Now the firefighter in charge of the operation, who was a junior, by the way, was not passed any of this information from the emergency operators. In his mind, extinguishing the flames was still the only way to minimise loss of life, not a full evacuation. The emergency operators would note which flats they received calls from, then communicate that information to a command

unit at the tower. These units would then pass on the information via radio to the firefighters inside the building so that they could go and rescue residents. But deep in the burning concrete building, radios were completely overwhelmed and therefore not working. And this is just fucking unbelievable. Because what they did instead, because the radios weren't working, was that the command unit would write information down on little scraps of paper and hand them to firefighters, who would then run the message to the firefighters inside the burning building.

Basically, it was complete chaos. One family of five, who first phoned 999 at 1.29am, had their information written down on one of these bits of paper and relayed to firefighters inside the building. But nobody came for them. The family were told again and again to stay put. And that help was definitely on its way. An hour later, an hour inside a burning building, at 2.27am, the family phoned 999 again.

They now said that the fire was right outside their window. But once again, this message was relayed to the command unit. The information was written down on a little bit of paper. And still, nobody came. And that family phoned again at 3.09am and then again at 3.18. In that last call, the operator told the family to make a run for it. I hate that so much. Can you imagine? No. Being told by somebody you think is an expert who is going to save you, who is going to get the word to somebody who's going to come in and rescue you

and your partner and your three children. And then they tell you, after all that time, to make a run for it. And now, because they had waited so long, the smoke was too thick and escape was now completely impossible. All five members of that family died. They died that night. The youngest was 80 years old. It's estimated that they all could have made it out of the building

at any time until 2.45am. Oh, my God. So literally 20 minutes before they were told to make a run for it. So fucked up. Okay. It was at this point that the stay put policy was finally abandoned. And evacuation finally became a part of the plan. But by this point, it was far too late. Witnesses on the ground watched on as trapped residents used their phone lights to signal from their windows for help. They saw

people jumping to their deaths to escape the smoke and flames, with one man landing just inches from a firefighter on the ground. One person did manage to escape using blankets tied together to form a rope. But in a statistic that makes my toes curl, of the hundreds of calls emergency services received that night, only three calls from trapped residents led to successful rescues. Everyone else either escaped on their own, happened to stumble across a fire crew on their way to rescue someone else, or never made it out of Grenfell at all. As day broke, the building was still in flames. If you're British, you absolutely will have seen it on the news. It was like jaw-dropping. Do you remember where you were? I don't remember where I was, but I remember seeing it and just thinking it looked like they had accidentally mislabeled a building

that had been carpet bombed in Syria with West London. That's what I remember thinking. Police told the crowds gathered outside the building to text, call or even tweet anybody they knew who was still inside and tell them to self-evacuate. Only two more rescues took place, one at 6.05am and the last one at 8.07am. The situation outside the building was now a full-blown humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of people were suddenly destitute. Their homes and all of their worldly possessions were gone.

Crowds of survivors, friends and family, desperate for news about their loved ones, congregated at the base of Grenfell. And where they met with compassion and support? No. The response from the government and public services in the aftermath was nothing short of utterly disgraceful. The slow and ineffective handling of the situation

meant that traumatised survivors were left to navigate a complex nightmare of bureaucracy in search of justice and compensation. Police at the scene acted with increasing aggression towards people desperately searching for their families, even threatening them with arrest. It was later revealed that the senior officers at the scene had expressed concerns that the situation would turn into, quote,

another Duggan, which is a reference to the Tottenham riots following the police shooting of Mark Duggan in the back in 2011. Anti-terror operations were put in place at the scene of the fire, and witnesses have stated that they saw armed police patrolling the street. Grenfell's local council was the royal borough of Kensington and Chelsea, or RBKC. And I think most people, even non-UK residents, you will have heard of Kensington and Chelsea, and that is because it is the richest borough in the whole entirety of the UK. It's where all the museums are. And it also contains many of the most expensive homes in the whole country. Though we do have to explain that Kensington and Chelsea is a microcosm of a divided Britain. The south of the borough is home to Kensington Palace Gardens, better known as Billionaires Row, one of the most

expensive streets in the UK. But to the north of the borough, Gaire's Row, one of the most expensive streets in the UK. But to the north of the borough, Goulbourne ranks as one of the two poorest wards in the whole of London, where Victorian-era diseases like tuberculosis and rickets have made a comeback. And life expectancy in parts of North Kensington is an unbelievable 20 years lower than in the south. But regardless of where in the borough a disaster like Grenfell occurs, if it does, it is the responsibility of the local authority or council to handle the situation. So the RBKC has a legal duty to set up rest centres and find emergency housing for every single resident. And just to be really, really clear,

although there is a huge divide between the north and the south of that borough, that borough, imagine the council taxes that they are raking in from the people that live in the wealthy part of that borough. They have money. That local authority has fucking money. And they had to use that money to do all of these things to help these people of Grenfell Tower. But they did none of those things. They didn't help them find emergency housing. They didn't do fucking shit. The whole thing was an utter shambles. These people who had just lost everything didn't know where to go or who to turn

to. And there was absolutely no organisation or planning at all. Some people were directed to the local leisure centre, which had been set up as like a temporary shelter with like mattresses on the floor. On arrival, they were asked to write down their names and information on a piece of paper, which was then just like dumped in a box somewhere. Some residents were given hotel rooms and simply forgotten about, and in many cases, entire families were placed in single rooms. Others were completely ignored by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and were left to sleep rough for almost a week after the fire. One survivor who lost her family that day said, I cannot help but feel that had our community lived

in a different part of the borough, on the more affluent side, had we been from a different class, had we been less ethnic, the response in the aftermath would have been immediate. Theresa May didn't even visit the scene that day. Instead, she spent most of that day behind closed doors at number 10, scheming on how to deflect blame and evade accountability. Can you imagine a disaster like that happening and the prime minister not going there that fucking day? I just, no, I can't. But I can because it happened and I watched it. Yeah.

I can remember feeling like there is just absolutely no way this is actually happening because it was when I was still at the theatre and people were ringing because another thing that happened was lots of public buildings were like bring your donations here and we will take them and like the whole of London united like it was really quite something to see and we were taking cash donations after the show but I can't remember being specific. Obviously,

in hindsight, I can't believe that she didn't go, but it felt so manic. I don't remember noticing that she wasn't there. And I don't know. She basically, yeah, they spent the entire day just sort of thinking about how they were going to respond to this tragedy. And only after immense public pressure, 36 hours after the fire, Theresa May finally announced a full-scale public inquiry was to take place. Which, you know, is our favourite thing to do in this country, is to do a full-scale public inquiry, which simply, and maybe I'm being very cynical about this, I'm not saying we shouldn't do public inquiries, but very cynically I feel like they're just there to be like, look, we're doing something about it, everybody stop screaming at

us, it'll take two years to do, and then by then everyone will have moved on and there to be like, look, we're doing something about it. Everybody stop screaming at us. It will take two years to do. And then by then, everyone will have moved on and there'll be 10 other things that have happened. And then the public inquiry will make a certain set of recommendations and we'll just ignore those. Meanwhile, many residents remained in critical condition at various London hospitals. And one of those people was Marcio Gnomes.

Marcio spent six days in hospital while his pregnant wife, Andrea, and their children were in comas from smoke inhalation. No authority had been in touch with them. In the end, McDonald's, the fast food restaurant, paid for Marcio to stay in a hotel next to the hospital for three weeks. That I remember. I remember that being in the news. This is what I mean. I feel like the government, the institutions that are meant to be there to safeguard people and take care of people, because just to be super clear,

Grenfell Tower, it's government property. So like, just to be clear, the reason that the government is needing to be responsible for this, it's not private property, it's government-owned property. The people living there were council tenants. Like, this is their fucking building and they were responsible for safeguarding those people but no

in that stead we saw corporations like mcdonald's and people digging into their pockets to help these people and i think that was one of the tiny positive things that came out of this which was like how much people in london and the community itself rallied around itself and the people that suffered from this but fuck the government honestly they handled this they couldn't have handled it any worse and oh and I remember that fucking prick Jacob Rees-Mogg being like so just you know to put this into context for other people a sitting MP at the time had the psychopathic zero level of empathy to say, well, why didn't they just leave the building?

So when they were being told by emergency operators to stay in the building, stay in the building, stay in the building, and that's why they died. He had the audacity to say, why didn't they use their common sense and leave? Fuck you, you piece of shit. I would love to lock that man in a burning building. Oh, let's. More information about Jacob Rees-Mogg if he claims that his first language is Latin.

You absolute trollop. I hate him. Trollop. I fucking hate him. Yeah, no, there are a few people I hate more. Anyway, let's get back to Marcio. His wife, Andrea, remained in a coma for 15 days. And during that time, Marcio was told that his baby, their baby, was stillborn via caesarean section.

When Andrea woke up, the first thing she asked Marcia was, how's the baby? This is just one of the countless heartbreaking stories from the victims of Grenfell Tower. And the community demanded answers. They wanted to know who was responsible and how it was allowed to happen in London in 2017 in the richest borough in the whole nation. More than anything, they wanted justice. The weekend after the fire, protesters gathered at Kensington Town Hall where they chanted bring them out referring to the council members responsible for grandfather during this protest conservative politician ken hawkins another man who covered himself in absolute glory during this time tweeted let's get ourselves a

hang-in suggesting that the protesters many of whom were survivors of the fire, should be put to death. What country are we in? I don't know. This is honestly, it's one of the most unbelievably shocking examples of just government corruption, greed, everything you said at the start of the episode. And it's only weeks after Joe Cox. So it, you know, I remember feeling like, not only do I literally live in a country where politicians getting shot in the street, buildings are made of petrol. to the aftermath failed miserably. The community stepped up. The local youth club became a safe space for survivors

and for the bereaved to get away from the media and the crowds. They distributed cash to residents, organised transport to hotels and hospitals, provided clothing, mobiles, laptops, kettles and microwaves, and even created a pop-up pharmacy and doctor's practice. All things that it is not for the public to have to do because we have a fully functioning government into which we pay taxes for exactly this kind of thing when it happens. And it didn't end there because a nearby mosque opened its doors to survivors and gave out

bedding, clothes and toiletries, as well as offering counselling. And it also organised the initial meetings between the community and the police, fire services and politicians. The community truly banded together to provide the survivors with dignity and support as the government doubled down and focused simply on covering its arse.

Because, yeah, like I said, Grenfell Tower is owned by the government and it was mostly occupied by social renting tenants. So it is, like I said, Grenfell Tower is owned by the government and it was mostly occupied by social renting tenants. So it is, as I said, the government and local authorities' responsibility to provide the people in there with safe and adequate housing. And the tragedy at Grenfell was a cataclysm that highlighted a number of issues relating to government housing policy in this country that have been percolating for at least four decades. And whether it was the Conservatives or Labour in power, over those 40 years, they had all simply ignored the crisis. And there had also already been incidents in the past

which should have acted like a giant deafening warning alarm and led to action which should have prevented Grenfell ever happening in the first place. But of course, nobody was listening. So how did this manage to happen? How was it allowed to happen? When Grenfell Tower was built in 1974, London builders had to comply with what was called the London Model Bylaws. The London Model Bylaws was a set of codes that banned the use of anything combustible being used on the external walls of a building. These bylaws can be traced all the way back to the Great Fire of London in 1666 and a code that banned the use of wood in favour of

bricks. Makes sense. Yep, that's how that works. Let's not put flammable combustible things on the outside of buildings Yeah, let's not build bakeries in wooden houses And this code, the we love bricks we hate wood code Is a huge reason why London survived the bombings in World War II Of course there was a vast amount of damage But a lot of places were a lot worse off Oh my god, places like Coventry Yeah, razed to the ground. Flawed.

But then, along came Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and her campaign of deregulation essentially unleashed the markets to make their own rules. In her second term, Michael Heseltine, then Secretary of State for Housing, promised maximum self-regulation and minimum government interference for the building industry. What could possibly go wrong? So what that meant is that builders could pay private consultants

who had a clear conflict of interest to confirm that their projects were compliant with building regulations without the go-ahead from local councils. And presumably, everyone was so busy looking at the miners' strikes, no one noticed. So throughout the 80s, the government began insulating the UK's concrete post-war tower blocks with a rain screen of non-combustible insulation, with panels made of glass reinforced plastic and plastic has any fucking first year materials science student will tell you or just like a kid using a magnifying glass to melt his

army plastic men in his garden will tell you plastic is always flammable and here is where we get into the examples of situations that preceded Grenfell that should have told people we need to pay attention. And I think a lot of people when Grenfell happened were not aware of these situations that had happened in the past. So let's get into them. In 1991, arsonists set fire to a bin outside one such tower block in Knowlesley Heights, Merseyside. And the fire tore through the building's cladding, all the way up to the 11th floor. The same exact cladding that was on Grenfell.

Firefighters later said that it was the most terrifying thing they had ever seen, and that flames were coming from every landing window in the building. And what did the government do about it? They downplayed the incident, covered up the reason behind the fire, and kept on installing the same cladding in projects all around the country. And this same cladding, the one that tore through the block in Knollsley Heights, actually, technically, complied with standards. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection.

Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down.

Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution. I was f***ed up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is The Rise and Fall of Diddy. Listen to The Rise and Fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. In a new fire regulation document called Approved Document B,

which sounds like something from a spy film. Oh my God. It's that trick, right? Of like, if you're going to have a meeting about something important or you're going to make a document with lots of important juicy things in give it the most fucking boring name on the planet so nobody pays any attention to it and there you go that is the perfect example approved document b and in approved document b knollsley heights had a fire rating of class zero and we need to know that because the rating system is extremely

important to understand the story of Grenfell Tower. Yeah, sorry guys, we're about to get into a lot of very boring information about fire testing and fire safety. But like this just highlights the level of I don't give a fuck that this story is underpinned by. So how does one achieve class zero? Don't worry, I'm going to bore you to death with it. To achieve a class zero rating, a material would be tested to see how fire spread across its surface only. I'm not going to lie, that sounds like a really fun job

that I wouldn't mind doing. So now it goes, astronaut, dinosaur expert, true crime podcaster, fire safety expert. This system, however much Saru's excited about it is quite problematic because what the panel is made of and the panel is the only thing they're testing is made of one material on its surface and then a different material throughout the rest of it so it's essentially two sheets of metal not flammable sandwiching a tasty filling of plastic, flammable. That's what happens in Grenfell and in Knowlesley Heights. So just

like, the surface is fine. What about the underneath? And what about the bit in the middle? So because fire couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't spread across the surface of the metal in the panel, the material was rated class zero zero which meant the law said it was perfectly fire safe to use on buildings oh my god even though we all know that it had a flammable plastic core yep so it's not difficult no it's not difficult and if you remember it's basically in grenfell it's like aluminium aluminium inside petrol yeah and they're like it's basically in Grenfell, it's like aluminium, aluminium, inside petrol. Yeah. And they're like, it's fine. Maybe try burn the whole thing and see if you die of cyanide poisoning

before you give it a class zero rating. If the Knowlesley Heights fire had been properly investigated, then the issues with the class zero rating system would have been realised, one would hope, and the system would have been changed for a more thorough test, which would have meant that what happened at Knowlesley Heights would never have happened again. But of course, this isn't how things played out. And this incident in Merseyside wasn't even the government's only opportunity to make changes before Grenfell. In 2009, a fire broke out in Lackanell House,

a 14-storey block of flats in Camberwell, South London. Just a few years before, in 2006, cladding panels had been fitted to the building's exterior for insulation and aesthetic purposes. These panels were made of high-pressure laminate, which is essentially tightly packed layers of wood and glue sandwiching combustible insulation in between. Six people, aged from 20 to 34 years old, were killed in that fire in Camberwell.

An inquiry was held, and the BRE found that the panels used in Lacanel didn't even meet these shitty Class Zero standards. But the Labour found that the panels used in Lacanel didn't even meet these shitty class zero standards. But the Labour government at the time, the supposed champions of the working class, did absolutely nothing. In 2010, when the Conservatives came back into power by a landslide led by David Cameron, the world was still recovering from the 2007 global financial crisis. And Cameron ushered in an age of austerity, hoping to catalyse economic growth. He also implemented what he called Big Society, where private organisations would take over the responsibilities once held by the central government.

Obviously flying in the face of Thatcher's there's no such thing as society slogan. Deregulation was at the absolute core of Cameron's agenda very much still Thatcher right but I'm going at it from a different angle he's like hey why don't you grab a shovel and go out and help your neighbor who you know is trapped in their house because the pavements are so fucked up because the council hasn't done anything about that I don't know how a shovel helped but I'm sure that was part of a campaign. Dig for victory. Dig for victory. But we're not at war, sir. Doesn't matter. Are you digging? I don't see any digging.

Show me those radishes. And yes, this dig for Britain, dig for the economy to claw it back, was regarded by many as the most radical reshaping of the British state since Thatcher herself. And in the January of 2012, in his New Year's speech, Cameron announced, quote, this coalition has a clear New Year's resolution to kill off the health and safety culture for good. Five years later, 74 people would die in a fire in a West London high-rise, as a result of decades of successive governments refusing to take accountability for their actions and repeatedly putting profits over people. An inquest into the Lackanell House fire began the following year and took 50 days to complete.

The coroner informed the government of how difficult it was to understand the ambiguous guidance in approved document B. The government was implored to provide clear guidance in regard to the spread of fire through the walls of buildings. This was yet another chance for the government to make the changes they should have made after the fire in Knowlesley Heights in 91. It was their chance to scrap Class Zero and make it absolutely clear that combustible materials did not belong on the external walls of high-rise buildings. Again, a pretty bloody basic standard to set. But of course, they did nothing. And you, because you're very intelligent, are probably wondering how cladding panels with solid petrol in the middle were ever allowed on the market for homes in the first place.

Well, aluminium composite material, ACM, was first invented in the 60s. And a German company soon found that bonding it to plastic made it even easier to manipulate and cheaper to make. ACM started off being used in furniture, but by the 90s, it was being used in buildings too. There are a number of ACM manufacturers, but the one who sold the cladding to Grenfell was a US manufacturing firm called Arconic, and they called their ACM cladding Raynabond.

Raynabond was sold in three different versions, of which Raynabond PE, with its pure polyethylene core, was the most flammable. Arconic, knowing this, continued to sell Raynabond PE, despite it having catastrophically failed European fire safety tests in 2004. How, how, how, how

are you continuing to sell this? Fucking what is going on? Do you remember when Vauxhall, was it Vauxhall? Volkswagen? Volkswagen faked the emissions test and they were fined into the dirt for that. This is buildings where people literally live.

It blows my mind. Yeah, poor people are, so. Yeah, yeah. So, just in case we need to hammer it home once again, everybody knew just how dangerous this material was. But, again, nothing was done. Because, if something had been done, that would have meant a loss of profit

in the name of basic fire safety and a risk to human life. So why would anyone bother? So some countries, after it became clear that this wasn't safe, including Germany, who invented the stuff, stopped buying it. They had very high standards on how flammable building materials could be used. Not, hopefully. Yeah, not. Can you not? Can you not cover this building in flammable petroleum? Some sort of petroleum offcut? No? Okay, please carry on.

And yeah, it's just like, it's unbelievable. But the UK's construction firms loved squeezing every single penny. So they opted for Raynab Bond PE because it was three pounds cheaper per square meter than the less flammable options. But we also have to make it clear here that Arconic also flat out lied to UK builders about their test results. So on one hand, yes, you can say UK construction firms were incredibly cheap. They were going for the cheapest shit possible. But also, Arconic has so much to answer for because they just lied. They deliberately covered up how dangerous Rayner Bond PE was. And by 2008, Arconic's UK sales team had sold over 100,000 square metres of the deadly cladding

for use in refurbishment projects around the UK, bringing in a tasty 3.5 million euros in profit. And just in case anybody's wondering, well, how do you know they covered it up? Maybe they just didn't know. Bollocks. Arconic's head UK salesperson, a woman named Debbie French, was fully aware of how dangerous Raynaud Bond PE was. But she was explicitly told by her superiors that she was not allowed to tell customers about how much safer the other two options were. And in 2014, Debbie French pulled off a huge sale of the stuff to be used in Grenfell Tower. At the Grenfell inquiry, French would deny that she had withheld any information to close the sale. But Debbie French can get in the fucking bin.

Yeah, I would not like to be Debbie French. Well, yeah, because if you were Debbie French right now, I'd go for you. Both combustible cladding and tons of combustible foam insulation have been widely used in construction for years. And manufacturers make a huge effort to downplay their inherent dangers through marketing and creative branding. But marketing is just one way these enormous companies bullshit in order to boost their sales. Industry lobbyists have infiltrated the regulations board and have been able to dictate the writing of fire and smoke regulations. It happens all over industry, but this one is particularly nefarious.

What that means is that the companies write the rules that they themselves have to abide by. That's why lobbyists exist. So just very much the perfect example of marking your own homework. And the government were just like, yeah, sure, that's fine. Not even doing your homework. You're the teacher and you're not setting any homework. Fuck this so much. Wet play for everybody.

Foam insulation on Grenfell Tower came primarily from two companies, Silatex and Kingspan. The Silatex insulation was made from polyisocyanurate and the Kingspan insulation was phenolic. All you need to know about those is that they're both combustible and both produce toxic smoke when they're burned. It's there. Where are the chemists? I'm sorry.

Where are the chemists? Is there literally no other material on the planet that doesn't burn like it's fuel and kill everybody who breathes in the smoke what is going on according to a study in 2019 just one single kilogram of celotex product was enough to fill a normal sized room with and this is a quote an incapacitating and ultimately lethal level of smoke when burned. Fuck. Yeah, fuck exactly, because there was almost 20,000 kilos of that stuff on the walls of Grenfell Tower. Kingspan even falsified their fire safety tests. A particularly damning text exchange between two Kingspan employees in 2016 revealed it all. Person one said,

doesn't actually get class zero when we test the whole product though. LOL. Exclamation mark. Person two, what? Capital letters. We lied? Question mark. Person one, all we do is lie in here. Okay. So Debbie French, person one, andob rees-mogg locked in a fucking room and look i'm not here to advocate death although i have made insinuations of that since but they have to be forced to what was it your friend who used to be a marine said was the worst thing that ever happened to him oh when he was hazing for a frat, he was locked in a cupboard for 24 hours listening to I'm Turning Japanese. Okay, so that's what we do to them. Debbie French, Person 1, and Jacob Rees-Mogg locked in a room and they just have to listen to I'm Turning Japanese for 72 hours.

Yeah, I was going to up it. Okay, that's fine. And then, okay. I also think he had to drink a gallon of milk, which is impossible to do without vomiting. These lies exposed by this text exchange worked. Kingspan won huge contracts on UK high-rises, left, right and centre. So yes, cladding and insulation played a major role in the Grenfell tragedy. But they were far from the only reasons that people died that day. The whole building from top to bottom was severely under-equipped.

Every high-rise in the UK operates under a compartmentalisation system in cases of fire. As we described earlier, it means that if a fire breaks out in one flat, the fire and the smoke is supposed to be contained within that flat alone. So even if the cladding had been as horrendously combustible and toxic as it was, if all of the other bullshit had happened, if the equipment and the rules that are meant to be followed within a high-rise building had been followed, that many people would not have died. Because compartmentalization relies on the building having numerous safety features which are up to standard. But as we know grenfell tower

was fitted with non-compliant lifts and poorly designed smoke control systems as well as gas pipes that punched holes through the fucking ceiling compromising the whole compartmentalization system on each floor someone should come around and be like oh yeah we'll just pop a hole in that stick the pipes through and also the fire doors didn't close themselves and the building had no evacuation plan whatsoever, especially for the numerous disabled residents who lived there. And the onus for all these mind-boggling failures falls on the ineptitude of the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation,

which from now on we'll call the TMO. And this bit just makes it even worse because the residents of Grenfell had been trying to alert the TMO about the fire safety issues in that building for years, but their concerns were ignored time and time again. When we said that the Grenfell disaster wasn't the first high-rise fire of its kind, it wasn't even the first major fire at Grenfell Tower. Back in 2010, fire broke out in the communal area on the 6th floor, and the thick black smoke had managed to reach the 15th floor. This incident exposed a huge problem with the building's smoke extraction system.

But the TMO simply brushed it off as a, quote, minor fault. The TMO knew full well that fire doesn't kill as much as the effects of smoke, and many residents almost died because of smoke inhalation in 2010. One resident, Eddie Daffarn, wrote the TMO a tragically prescient letter saying, In Grenfell Tower, with its interior staircase and malfunctioning ventilation system, there is certainly a high probability that in the event of another fire, the whole building can become an inferno. Eddie Daffarn is a man who I am very much in awe of.

Yes, same. He has done so much and did so much in the seven years between this first incident and the second and nobody paid a single bit of attention to what this man was screaming about. He predicted Grenfell almost a decade before it happened and all of these experts, all of these people in the government, in the TMO, in fire safety, nobody had a clue. Nobody listened to Eddie.

And the TMO actually told him that the problems had been, quote, addressed, but they were, of course, lying. Yeah, they were busy in the next two years putting a flammable crown on the top of the building. The TMO knew that the vents on the tower's smoke ventilation system never closed properly. And despite being told by the London Fire Brigade that they had to fix it by May 2014, the TMO did nothing. In fact, they even refused a freedom of information request by Eddie Daffod himself regarding this very subject, saying that it was commercially sensitive. Which is obviously much more important than people dying. In December of that year, the Health and Safety Department of the TMO sent an internal email saying the following. Let's hope our luck holds out and there's no fires in the meantime. What's the

meantime? Do they mean forever? Do they mean until that building doesn't exist anymore? What do they mean in the meantime? Because they had no plans to solve the problems. And they were like, oh, look, we can only get the funding in to get it done in like two years time. Let's hope there's no fires in the meantime. What do they mean by the meantime? I think it means the person writing the email is like, so I won't work here anymore. I see. I see. Until I leave. Yeah. And then it's someone else's fucking problem.

No, you're probably entirely right. Eddie Daffan, being the pillar of the community that he is, made numerous complaints about Grenfell's fire safety to the TMO, and he ran a blog page about it online. The TMO, of course, hated Eddie, and they hated his blog. They even went as far as to have his blog site blocked from staff servers at their offices so none of their employees could even read it. I mean, I'm just out of what the fuck's today. I'm all out. Well, I hope you've got one more. Because the TMO sent Eddie Daffan legal letters accusing him of defamation,

scaremongering and agitating and they labelled him a troublemaker tenant for being like, please don't burn everyone in this building alive again. So another of the issues that Eddie wrote about on his blog was the poor access for fire engines down the tiny road that led to the tower. This guy, somebody give him a job being a bloody fire safety expert. I mean, he needs a knighthood, he needs an OBE. He needs everything, just give him everything. The Victoria Cross. Give him that stupid scepter that King Charles has got. Give him everything. And of course, once again, Eddie had been right, because on the night of the tragedy, fire engines found themselves completely

backed up along this road. Eddie had also made numerous complaints about the fire doors with faulty self-closing mechanisms. But again, the TMO did nothing and even ignored demands from the fire brigade themselves. Because the London Fire Brigade had told the TMO in 2016 that they had to fix the fire doors in all of the 650 tower blocks that they managed. But the RBKC and the TMO didn't want to spend the £620,000 it would have cost. As we said, the borough of Kensington Chelsea is the richest in the UK. It collects council tax from 9,000 residents, many of them who are absolutely bloody loaded. So £600,000 is nothing. Especially when you consider that over recent years that council has spent millions

subsidising opera tickets for residents. Kill me. No, they're in the room too. With the milk and the fucking song. Yeah, okay. So it's not a question of whether this borough could afford the £620,000. They simply

clearly didn't feel that the poorer residents of Grenfell were worth the cost. And why would they? The council leader, a woman named Elizabeth Campbell, admitted last month that in her 11 years as a council member, she had never once set foot inside a high-rise housing project in her own borough. She's in there too. So the RBKC and the TMO gave themselves a five-year period to change the fire doors, instead of the one-year deadline that the London Fire Brigade had given them. You know, don't work too hard.

Don't go crazy. Yeah, we've got the flower show to think of. And that's every year. We can't replace all these doors in one year. Let's give ourselves five years to do it. And then let's just not do it. So the London Fire Brigade carried out an inspection seven months before Grenfell Tower and found that the TMO had still done nothing about the fire doors, but they had time to put the weird, shiny, flammable crown on the roof of this building. And the Grenfell

Inquiry found that smoke inhalation was one of the key factors in the cause of fatalities and if those doors had been in place properly and closed properly as they were supposed to, it could have saved so many people's lives, even all of the other bullshit withstanding. After the fire, councils around the country started panicking and checking the cladding on their tower blocks, only to find that enormous numbers of them

were fitted with the highly combustible ACM panels. Five tower blocks in Camden had the same cladding, and surprise, surprise, it had been fitted by the same contractors that worked on Grenfell, a company called Ryden and Harley Facades. They're in the room. And inside those buildings, investigations found the exact same

problems that Grenfell had with faulty fire doors and compartmentalisation. Camden Council ended up moving 700 people out of their flats overnight, just six days after Grenfell, in order to make their tower blocks safe, the way they should have been from the beginning. Imagine living in a high-rise. And knowing it's made of petrol. Yeah. This was now a national crisis unfolding before all of us. The government began to test cladding across the country and found that countless blocks had combustible materials covering their walls. It's really shocking when that's what you've been installing, isn't it?

Yeah. When that was the cheapest thing on the market and you put it all over the country. Yeah. It is costing the government an estimated £10 billion, billion with a B, just to remove the combustible cladding from around 10,000 buildings that have been discovered to have it. And that figure, 10,000 buildings, is not taking into account other buildings that have failing fire safety features like not closing self-closing doors that need to be fixed. And these changes are now being made to government-owned buildings at huge expense. But it could have been totally avoided in the first place if the government had paid even the slightest bit of attention to the first incident. We also have to take into account the countless people out there who have bought ex-local authority flats covered in the same cladding.

And since the government has sold off that social housing, it's not their problem anymore. So that means that there are ordinary people out there who have scrimped and saved and worked hard to buy themselves and their family a home. And now they are being told that that home is worthless and completely unmortgageable. Yep. I have friends that this has happened to. So a friend I went to school with bought him and his partner,

bought their first flat in London, a big achievement for them, only to find out after Grenfell the whole building is covered in the same exact cladding. But like you said, it's ex-local authority. It's now privately owned by them. And that means it would cost upwards of like £500,000 per flat to be able to fix the cladding. And they now are stuck with a flat that is completely worthless, that if a fire starts, they will probably die in it. I mean, what do you do? They sunk all of their money into it. And this is what I mean. There's no one singular point or one singular type of person

that has been affected by this. This is just rampant corruption that has led to so many problems for so many ordinary people. It's a national crisis. It's nothing smaller than that. So the Grenfell Inquiry. It began its first hearings on the 14th of September 2017. The inquiry is divided into two phases.

The first addressed the events on the night of the fire itself. And the second phase, which is currently still, all these years later, ongoing, is to do with investigating the wider situation. 74 people died in the Grenfell fire, the youngest being six-month-old Lina Belkady. And that doesn't include a string of attempted suicides from those affected. 67% of the people who survived Grenfell reported needing treatment for PTSD. In April 2023, a group of 22 parties, including the cladding company Arconic, Whirlpool, the people who made the fridge that started the fire, the RBKC, TMO and three central government departments, paid a settlement of £150 million to 900 people involved in the fire. The final report is said to be published in October 2023. And although no convictions will be made during this inquiry,

and we're still going to have to wait months to get the full answers from it, the Met Police have been running a criminal investigation for the past six years. Criminal trials, if they start at all, aren't likely to start until 2025. But the potential charges for those found responsible could include corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, fraud and health and safety offences. I don't know if that's ever going to happen. I don't. Not one single person has been held accountable for what happened at Grenfell.

And I just do not see anybody going to jail for this. No. Despite the clear evidence that people knew the dangers and covered it up. So as we said at the start of this episode, this week marks six years since that fire tore through Grenfell Tower.

That fire was not a random accident nor was it a foregone conclusion. It was a result of decades of apathy and money grubbing austerity and an attitude by government after government of not caring about the poorest people in our society it is a dark stain on the history of the uk government and one that must not be forgotten or forgiven which is why if you drive past it there were some people who said that they should just leave it a burned out shell so people had to

look at it it's now covered and it says Grenfell forever on our hearts on it you can see it from the main road as I said if you're driving in to the city from Heathrow you drive past it obviously that land being in Kensington is worth a lot of money and I would say I'm on the side of the people being like no leave it exactly where it is so you have to confront what you've done oh absolutely I mean so difficult I mean the UK has the worst homelessness in the whole of Western Europe and it's because our social housing system is so destroyed and not just our social housing our housing system is completely fucked up in this country I absolutely understand people who say,

leave it there so we have to look at it and confront it. But at the same time, we have huge amounts of homelessness in this country. But again, I don't know. It's horrendous. It's a horrendous, horrendous monument to government corruption. I think I'd put a stop to foreign ownership of property before I replaced Grenfell.

Well, quite. So yeah, absolutely appalling. And I still think there are people who haven't been rehomed. Oh, I'm sure. So, yeah, that's it, guys. Bad stuff all around. Yeah, horrendous, horrendous stuff. I don't know.

We'll have to wait and see if anybody actually goes to prison for this, as they rightly should. And I know I said this in under the duvet when we did the god we did the grenfell update a year ago wow feels like we just did it the reason we brought it up was because obviously those people who made the horrendous like disgusting tasteless little videos of like people in cardboard buildings like burning and screaming they got sent to prison and i'm like what they did is disgusting yeah and gross and those people are completely tasteless and classless and horrible little troll people but they did it in a private

whatsapp group then one of them then uploaded to social media and the police came and arrested them and put them in prison these people literally killed 74 people and no one has gone to prison for that so let's think about you know as you say with foreign ownership versus bringing grenfell down let's talk about maybe the priorities that our police seem to have right now about what is more important but there you go that's that so that's grenfell and please go listen to our um shorthand on megalodon to cheer yourself up and um yeah be more eddie daff And yeah, be more Eddie Daffron. Yeah. And be less everyone else in this story.

And we'll see you next time. Goodbye. Bye. I'm Jake Warren. And in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey

to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

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