by Charles Siegel
The dishonest and cynical way in which RS 5000 was tested and marketed reflected a culture within Celotex stretching back to at least 2009.
That was a key finding of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s “Phase 2” report, released on September 4, 2024. The finding appears at the beginning of a long, meticulous examination into the acts and omissions of Celotex, Ltd., the company that manufactured the insulation used in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower in London, which burned in a catastrophic fire in 2017. The report led to outrage in the press and among victims’ groups, and to terse denials by Celotex.
It was a damning indictment. But to anyone familiar with Celotex, it was ruefully laughable. Celotex, Ltd. had begun its corporate life nearly a century earlier, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of an American company of the same name. And this American Celotex had displayed precisely the same dishonest and cynical attitude toward the users of its products, and indeed toward its own workers, for many decades. Tens of thousands of them had died as a result of that corporate culture. The horror of Grenfell was but a gruesome, if entirely foreseeable, coda to this ghastly history.
*
Biruk Haftom was twelve years old. As are most London boys of that age, Biruk was crazy about soccer. Biruk’s mother Berkti had emigrated to the UK before he was born, after Eritrea began its war with Ethiopia. She’d had to leave her older son behind with her mother. But now, in 2017, she was hoping he’d be able to join her and Biruk soon. Could it be that he was already 18? And she and Biruk were happy for another reason: she was pregnant. Biruk was excited to have new siblings, older and younger, in his life.
Raymond Bernard, 63, also lived in London. He had come from Trinidad in 1969, in the great Windrush migration. He worked as an electrician, but decades before he had been a DJ with long, flowing locks that reflected the “free-thinking lion he was,” said a cousin.
Gloria Trevisan, 26, had lived in London less than a year, having come there with her boyfriend, with whom she lived, to find work. She had just completed her master’s degree in architecture from the University of Venice.
Gloria and her boyfriend, Biruk and his mother, and Raymond all lived in Grenfell Tower, a 24-storey block of flats in west London. And in the early hours of June 14, 2017, they all died there, along with 67 other victims, in the worst residential fire in British history since the conflagrations caused by German bombing during the Blitz.
The hellish Grenfell fire has been the subject of official investigations, sprawling litigation, even a short film by Steve McQueen. From the start, there was no shortage of blame to go around. The arrogant and indisputably racist disdain of the local housing authorities toward the warnings and pleas of residents about safety, lax building inspections, the negligent performance of the fire brigade dispatchers – all played their appalling parts.
But one thing was clear from the outset: the fire spread with demonic speed due to the exterior “cladding,” or aluminum-and-plastic panels installed on the sides of the tower to make it warmer and drier. While the exterior cladding was obviously a critical cause, what was less widely known in the immediate aftermath of the fire was the role that exterior insulation had played. Between the cladding and the concrete façade of the building lay a layer of foam insulation made of a material known as polyisocyanurate. Ninety five percent of the insulation that covered the Grenfell Tower exterior the night of the fire was made up of a product named RS5000, manufactured by Celotex.
Years of painstaking investigations followed the disaster. The official Prime Minister’s inquiry began just months later. The first phase of the report, which established the facts of the fire, was issued in October 2019. The second phase, which examined its causes, took almost five years more.
Among the conclusions reached in Phase 2 was that the insulation layer behind the cladding itself contributed to the fire’s rapid spread. London police said the insulation was “more flammable than the cladding.” Toxic smoke from the insulation also played a major role in the deaths. But the most critical assessment was that Celotex knew that the insulation was not sufficiently resistant to fire to be used in a building the height of Grenfell – or, for that matter, any building taller than 18 meters, or roughly five storeys. Celotex knew this because it knew the panels had failed the required flammability tests. So it simply performed the tests again. But this time Celotex rigged them.
The evidence regarding how the tests were rigged is complex. But the ultimate findings of the inquiry – after exhaustive examination of documents and interviews with Celotex personnel and others – are inescapable and grim. A sampling of just some of them shows an utter contempt for even the most basic standards of business and professional ethics:
- To market the insulation as fireproof “was not only false (because the product was combustible) but can only have been designed to mislead buyers with a poor understanding of fire classification standards.”
- Celotex “neither tested a representative [insulation] system nor was truthful in its marketing literature… [I]n the end, we know that Celotex chose not to be clear about what it had tested. On the contrary, it deliberately concealed from end users a vital component of the systems tested…. [T]he omission from the test report….would not be corrected.”
- This omission “completely undermined the disclaimers” in the report. Because the report was “materially incomplete,” the disclaimers were “effectively meaningless, as Celotex well knew.”
- “Taken in the round, the marketing literature for [Celotex’s insulation] contained two messages, both of which were false and deliberately misleading.”
By rigging the flammability tests and then lying about having done so, Celotex was able to compete in the market for this insulation product. And in 2014, as a direct result of that deception, that product was used extensively in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower. Three years later, 72 persons paid for that deception with their lives. At least three suicides, and 20 attempted suicides, including among emergency workers, have followed in the years since.
The lies that killed the Grenfell victims, however, were only the latest in a rotten corporate history stretching back to the early 20th century. For many years earlier, the parent Celotex had concealed the lethal dangers of another insulation product – one it marketed widely for decades. While this product was, in fact, highly effective against fire and heat, its dangers lay in its intrinsic physical properties. Over the decades these properties would condemn thousands of users, and indeed many of Celotex’s own workers, to early and painful deaths. The product in question, of course, was asbestos insulation.
Owing to its resistance to heat and its versatility, asbestos was widely used beginning in the late 19th century, in innumerable commercial, industrial and military applications. But asbestos fibers are also highly toxic. Persons exposed to high quantities of asbestos fibers include miners, plant workers making asbestos-containing products, and the ultimate installers and users of those products.
Millions of workers worldwide have died of asbestos-related diseases in the roughly century and half of its widespread use. In the U.S. alone, many hundreds of thousands at least are estimated to have perished. Thousands more family members have died of secondhand exposure through washing their spouses’ or parents’ dust-covered clothing.
The dangers of asbestos have been known for centuries. The Romans noted that slaves who worked with the mineral tended to die early. In the UK, British factory inspectors warned of the “evil effects” of breathing asbestos dust in 1898. A century ago, in 1924, British textile worker Nellie Kershaw died of asbestosis at 32. Her case became the first published medical account of the disease.
In the U.S., Celotex was one of the earliest companies in the asbestos business. It had begun as the Philip Carey Manufacturing Co., an Ohio concern formed in 1873. By 1915 it had acquired an asbestos mine and mill in Canada. Just 15 years later, Carey advertised in the trade journal “Asbestos,” in the same issue in which an article entitled “Pulmonary Asbestosis” stated that this was “a disease resulting from exposure to asbestos dust.” In June 1944, Carey again advertised in another trade journal, in the same issue in which an article entitled “Dust as an Industrial Hazard” described asbestosis as an “incurable and progressive” disease, and urged that “immediate steps be taken to combat the hazard” to “approximately 10,000 men in the insulating industries.” Later that year, a 42-year-old Carey employee died of asbestosis and sarcoidosis.
In the 1950s, Carey insulators and plant employees, or their widows, filed workers’ compensation claims. Eventually, in 1962, Carey hired an occupational health specialist, Dr. Thomas Mancuso, to review its operations. What followed between Carey and Dr. Mancuso would be echoed grotesquely, half a century later, in Celotex’s actions with regard to RS5000.
Carey’s sorry treatment of Mancuso, and its dismissal of his warnings, have been described in scores of judicial opinions and trial transcripts. For example, nearly 50 years before Grenfell, a number of workers at a Carey plant in Pennsylvania brought suit against Celotex and other defendants. After a jury found them liable, a federal judge in Philadelphia reviewed the evidence and upheld the jury’s findings. He blasted the company in language that anticipated Grenfell:
- “The record is replete with testimony that plaintiffs were never warned by Philip Carey during the tenure of their employment of the dangers associated with asbestos exposure and that they were not aware of the dangers until many years after the termination of their employment relationship.”
- “ Mancuso was specifically hired by Philip Carey in 1962 to study the problems of asbestos exposure at the Philip Carey facilities and to propose an occupational health program in order to decrease the number of worker asbestos exposure claims. He determined that there was a high degree of asbestos-related diseases and an occupational cancer problem in workers formerly employed at the Plymouth Meeting plant. Dr. Mancuso specifically advised high ranking corporate officials that there was an occupational cancer risk, that the former Philip Carey workers should be informed that they had a risk involving occupational cancer, and that they should be placed under medical surveillance for early detection of asbestos related conditions… After submitting his report, Dr. Mancuso’s employment with Philip Carey was terminated.”
- “Dr. Mancuso’s testimony demonstrates that high ranking officials of Philip Carey were fully aware of the dangers of asbestos exposure. John Humphrey, the president of Philip Carey, testified that he knew about the health hazards of asbestos exposure back in the early 1950’s. The evidence was sufficient for the jury to conclude that Philip Carey, through the knowledge and inaction of its highest officials, despite professional and scientific consultation and advice, deliberately intended to injure the plaintiffs by choosing to totally and blatantly disregard Dr. Mancuso’s warnings and recommendations that plaintiffs be informed of the risks that they had an asbestos-related condition.”
Celotex continued selling asbestos-containing products until the mid-1980s. Not one of these products ever contained warnings about their hazards.
It is thus sadly wrong to say, as the Grenfell Phase 2 report did, that Celotex’s “dishonest and cynical” corporate culture dated back to 2009. Nearly 80 years before that, its parent began undeniably to be aware of the health hazards of asbestos. It hired a safety consultant 30 years after that, then dismissed him when he told it the truth about its products and operations. It never warned anyone – its own workers or its products’ users – about their dangers.
The Celotex managers who worked, and still work, in the UK, and who lied about the flammability of RS5000, are of course a world and a century away from the American executives who concealed the lethal risks of asbestos exposure. The company has been sold, resold and spun off multiple times. But across that great distance of time and space, and through all the corporate machinations and shape-shifting restructurings, the murderous corporate culture remained the same. The 72 dead of Grenfell were merely its latest victims.
***
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.