Cate Cooney speaking at the Inquiry hearing
The fire expert who prepared a draft fire safety strategy for the Grenfell Tower refurbishment never visited the site.
Cate Cooney, working for testing firm Exova, which was acquired by Element Materials Technology shortly after the Grenfell disaster, produced a report on the building in 2012. She admitted to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that she relied on one of her London-based colleagues to undertake a site visit.
Asked if it was usual to prepare a fire safety strategy for a building without having visited it, Cooney said “both yes and no” and explained that many strategies were prepared from drawings. Asked if it would have been useful in this case to have gone herself, she said: “It would have been, yes”.
Cooney was also questioned about an internal email she wrote to a colleague in which she suggested that architect Studio E’s proposals to refurbish Grenfell would made a “crap condition worse”.
Studio E’s plan involved repurposing the tower’s podium level to include new homes, which the former building control officer suggested was “not great” because of the way different use-classes were mixed around a single staircase. “It’s a matter of working out the worse bits and making the new stuff work,” she added.
Cooney also said in her email: “Basically I have told him [Studio E architect Bruce Sounes] we can massage the proposal to something acceptable, with separation, lobbies etc but that there are approval risks to the project on the ff shaft/MOE [means of escape] front”.
But she denied she was suggesting to Sounes that something could be done to get around the problem. Instead, she said she intended design changes that would improve the layout from a fire safety perspective.
She added: “The proposed design, as I remember it, wasn’t great. It took residents out of the single stair back through the building, which we wouldn’t allow to happen without further measures being in place.”
The inquiry continues.
