Torre Grenfell: El incendio al descubierto

A very well made documentary, excellent interviews.

The background and the technical aspects which were purposely kept from firefighters and safety advisory ignored is truly appalling.

The residents had been trying to improve the place they lived, and the place they ahd been paying for. The way they were ignored at multiple levels is disheartening but these folks fought back. They are still fighting.

This situation can happen again, causing further death and danger. These flammable materials should not be on any building, yet are apparently on many buildings in the UK and in other countries so this type of tragedy will occur again.

It feels like Piper Alpha, with Occidental never being charged--please charge the company and officials and decisionmakers that concealed the danger.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (10/10)

I wasn't in the UK when the Grenfell Tower tragedy happened, and I hadn't followed the news much at the time, but watching this documentary has been absolutely heart-wrenching.

It's a powerful, raw, and respectful account of the people affected, the lives lost, the survivors' trauma, and the sheer scale of injustice. The way it's structured gives space for voices that need to be heard, and it doesn't let you look away from the deep failures that led to such unimaginable loss.

The documentary doesn't sensationalise, it humanises. You feel the grief, the anger, the disbelief. It's devastating, but important. I cried. I got angry. And I was left thinking about how preventable it all was.

10 stars. Everyone should watch this.

STAR RATING: ***** Brilliant **** Very Good *** Okay ** Poor * Awful

In June 2017, an emergency call was made to the London fire brigade, regarding an apparently minor fire in a flat, which escalated into a towering blaze. With conflicting advice emerging from the fire service, the residents of Grenfell Tower remained in their homes, but even with the best efforts of the firefighters, seventy-two people ended up losing their lives. Afterwards, survivors and activists rallied together to demand justice and affect change.

In a year littered with devastating incidents (usually of the terrorism variety), the Grenfell Tower fire sticks in the mind on its own terms, both for the shock value of the event, and the social unrest and change it provoked in the aftermath. Nearly a decade on (unbelievable), Netflix delivers this neat little documentary, giving a human voice to those directly affected, from survivors to fire crew who attended the scene.

Unsurprisingly (if you drop your biases and think about things) none of the interviewees meet your stereotypes or perceptions of how they might be. We hear from a young woman who was sitting her exams at the time and had predicted good grades, as well as a well spoken man who wouldn't have wanted to have lived anywhere else. Whether these stereotypes existed or not, it's unsettlingly clear that the company in charge of the cladding didn't seem to think much of them, having been warned of the dangers and unsuitability of the material long in advance of the devastating incident.

Ultimately, the most unsettling aspect of the whole thing is that there are any number of high rises that still to this day have the same unsafe cladding, and that it's basically just a matter of time before something similar happens. The lives of the poor really have as little value in a 'first world' country as anywhere else, it seems. ****

This documentary does an excellent job of exposing the deep flaws, corruption, and shocking cover-ups that led to the Grenfell tragedy. But what made me genuinely angry was the so-called "stay put" protocol.

In a high-rise building - where heat and smoke rise (basic physics!) - the idea of telling residents to remain in their flats while the building burns is beyond reckless. It's a policy built on paper logic, not lived experience. It may look good on a spreadsheet, under perfect assumptions: perfect construction, flawless fire barriers, ideal conditions. But real fires don't behave like that. Smoke and flames spread fast, unpredictably. And the longer residents are told to stay inside, the greater the risk that escape routes will fill with smoke, stairwells will become impassable, and safe evacuation will no longer be an option.

I'm writing this from a place where Fire & Rescue Services strongly encourage early self-evacuation - if you can get out safely, go. Don't wait for firefighters. We are taught that smoke kills faster than flames, and that moving early can make the difference between life and death. Public awareness here is clear: the higher you are in the building, the greater the danger. Every second counts.

One thing I felt was missing in the documentary: some parts felt incomplete. For example, it was never clearly explained how the fire was eventually brought under control and put out. The timeline just skipped to a week after the fire. Also, a simple schematic illustrating the building's interior layout, stairwells, and the fire's progression would have greatly helped viewers visually understand the situation better.

It's important to acknowledge the firefighters who risked everything and now must live with the trauma of that night. They did what they could under impossible conditions, but it's clear they were constrained by confusing protocols and insufficient information.

Grenfell: Uncovered reinforced how deadly it can be when flawed policies are blindly followed long past the point where common sense and basic survival instinct should take over.

I sincerely hope that every person involved in causing this disaster faces full accountability.

It is striking that what the wealthy residents of Kensington and Chelsea deemed derelict - the Grenfell Tower, considered an eyesore threatening the value of their multi-million-pound homes - would come to symbolise a far more tragic dereliction of duty: the failure to protect the lives of its own residents.

In what proved to be a fateful and fatal cost-cutting decision, the council opted to save just £5,000 by replacing the recommended fire-retardant zinc cladding with combustible aluminium composite material (ACM). The cost? Seventy-two lives lost, and countless more irrevocably altered - through grief, PTSD, and guilt borne by survivors, first responders, and even the emergency call operators who repeated the doomed "stay put" advice.

This documentary seeks to answer the question that still haunts the public: who is responsible? The supplier knew the material posed fire risks, yet continued selling it in countries with lax building codes, including the UK. There had been numerous international precedents of ACM-fueled fires. In most, casualties were avoided. A 2014 fire in a Melbourne high-rise, for example, involved 400 residents and resulted in zero deaths - thanks to swift evacuation procedures.

The warnings were there. After a 2009 fire in London claimed six lives, a coroner urged reforms to fire safety legislation. The British government ignored them. One senior official is even alleged to have said, "Show me the bodies."

This film offers a definitive and devastating examination of the Grenfell disaster, interwoven with harrowing testimonies from survivors and first responders. In the end, the tragedy stands as a damning indictment of a system warped by corporate greed, corner-cutting, and governmental neglect. Because really - what else could it be?