NFPA Journal - Winter 2024 - 38

IN THE SUMMER OF 2017,
Mohammad Alhajali lived on the 14th floor of Grenfell
Tower, a 24-story block of public housing located
in West London. He shared an apartment, Flat 112,
with his brother, Omar, and a childhood friend,
Mahmoud Al-Karad. They had grown up together
in a small city in southern Syria. In 2014, as civil
war wracked the country, Mohammad and Omar
left their parents and siblings behind and resettled
in the United Kingdom, where they hoped to rebuild
their lives. By 2017, when Mohammad was 23, he was
studying civil engineering at the University of West
London and was engaged to be married. He was in
touch with his family daily and hoped to one day
return to Syria to help the country.
On the night of June 13-14, 2017, the brothers
visited a cousin in London and returned home to
Grenfell Tower around midnight. Their roommate
Mahmoud was still at work. At around 1:30 a.m.,
they heard shouting-the building was on fire. They
could see flames on the side of the building down
around the fourth floor and noticed that smoke was
curling under the door of their apartment. They
decided to try to leave the building, but the lobby
outside their door was dark and full of smoke. They
retreated back inside and yelled down to firefighters
on the ground below, who told them to stay where
they were and that help was on the way.
The Phase 2 report details
the political heedlessness,
bureaucratic expediency,
and corporate malfeasance
that produced one of the
most shocking public safety
disasters in modern memory.
A short time later, the brothers were relieved to
see a firefighter from the London Fire Brigade (LFB)
enter their apartment, and they begged him to get
them out of the building. The LFB, though, was
trying to organize a building-wide evacuation, and
for now, the firefighter said, he needed them to stay
put. Another resident was moved into the brothers'
apartment, where the air was less smoky, and a short
time later, firefighters moved them all to Flat 113,
along with residents from other apartments. Mohammad
called friends to tell them what was happening;
he tried his family but couldn't reach them.
What happened over the next couple of hours in
Flat 113 isn't entirely clear, but at some point, firefighters
were able to perform a partial evacuation
38 | NFPA JOURNAL * WINTER 2024
of the 14th floor, and some of the people who'd
sheltered in the flat, including Omar, got out-but
Mohammad was not among them. He continued
making calls as the fire wrapped around the tower,
pushing its way into the building's interior. He spoke
to Mahmoud, who'd returned from work to find
the building on fire, and Mohammad told him he
couldn't leave the flat because he was with a mother
and child who needed his help. His last conversation
was shortly after 4 a.m., with Omar and another
brother, Hashem. Conditions were getting worse,
Mohammad told them, and the people trapped in
Flat 113 with him were no longer responding when
he called their names. Minutes after that call,
Mohammad fell to his death from Grenfell Tower.
It's unknown whether the fall was deliberate or
accidental, but the instant that Mohammad Alhajali
stepped free from the burning tower was the culmination
of a troubling narrative that had been decades
in the making. Seventy-two people-infants, grandmothers,
entire families-died in the blaze, which
burned for more than 60 hours and involved hundreds
of firefighters. The fire began with an electrical fault
in a refrigerator on the fourth floor before moving
to the building's exterior. Fire spread was blamed on
the tower's combustible exterior cladding, known as
aluminum composite material, or ACM. Panels of ACM
include two thin sheets of aluminum that sandwich
a layer of polyethylene, a fabrication technique that
allows manufacturers to reduce the volume of aluminum
while maintaining the panel's structural integrity.
The catch is that polyethylene is a petroleum derivative;
when it burns, its heat release is identical to that
of gasoline. As more was learned about the Grenfell
Tower fire and how the building came to be sheathed
in what critics have described as " solid gasoline, " the
ripple effect of blame and culpability gradually spread
to include industry, government, the local housing
authority, the fire brigade, and more.
In September, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, a yearslong
government-led investigation into the fire and
the lead-up to the event, published the second phase
of its findings. The inquiry's Phase 1 report, published
in 2019, focused primarily on the fire itself
and the events immediately surrounding it; the new
Phase 2 report provides context for broader issues
including building regulations, fire safety, and social
housing. The 1,700-page Phase 2 report, sourced
from more than 320,000 documents, 1,600 witness
statements, and more than 300 public hearings,
details the political heedlessness, bureaucratic expediency,
and corporate malfeasance that produced
one of the most shocking public safety disasters in
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