On 14 June 2017, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London, England, at 00:54 BST and burned for 60 hours. Seventy people died at the scene and two people died later in hospital, with more than 70 injured and 223 escaping. It was the deadliest structural fire in the United Kingdom since the 1988 Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster and the worst UK residential fire since the Blitz of World War II.
The fire was started by an electrical fault in a refrigerator on the fourth floor. As Grenfell was an existing building originally built in concrete to varying tolerances, gaps around window openings following window installation were irregular and these were filled with combustible foam insulation to maintain air-tightness by contractors. This foam insulation around window jambs acted as a conduit into the rainscreen cavity, which was faced with 150 mm-thick (5.9-inch) combustible polyisocyanurate rigid board insulation and clad in aluminium composite cladding panels, which included a 2 mm (0.079-inch) highly combustible polyethylene filler to bond each panel face together. As is...