The Arconic (US) files

A cache of documents, unsealed following a request by the team working on a new Netflix documentary, shed new light on what senior figures in the US knew before the Grenfell fire

This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.

If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book Show Me The Bodies. Or you can buy a copy here. My forthcoming book, Homesick, can be preordered here.

Diana Perreiah’s name did not crop up at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry as much as you might have expected.

President of the global building and construction arm at Arconic, she was a very senior figure in the chain of command of the business which sold the cladding material used on Grenfell Tower.

This material, with its core of pure polyethylene which burns like petrol, has been found to have been the “primary cause” of the rapid fire spread at the tower. You might have felt that the question of how much was known about its risk by senior people in the company’s US headquarters was crucial.

But while Claude Schmidt (president of the company’s French arm) gave days of evidence, there was little discussion of Perreiah or her US colleagues.

Her name came up only briefly. On Day 94, an email emerged which showed that she had asked Schmidt to provide definitions of the various different types of aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding products the company sold. This email was sent on June 24 2015 - two years before the Grenfell fire.

Mr Schmidt asked his colleague, the technical expert Claude Wehrle, to produce a table for her. The table he produced was stark. It said the ‘PE’ version of the panel (with a core made from pure polyethylene) was “flammable” and had a “maximal building height of 8m to 12m depending [on] the country”.

Here, though, the trail ended. Schmidt was asked if the table was ever sent to Perreiah. He said he was “practically sure” it was - but there was no paper trail to prove it. This revelation alone was enough to make a headline in The Guardian, but that was the furthest anyone had gone towards establishing what the US arm of the company knew.

This week, we can finish that story - with a shocking new revelation about how much Perreiah was personally told, not only about the dangers of the cladding but also the specific fact that it had been sold for use on Grenfell Tower.

This is because of a civil case which was filed in the US in 2019, when bereaved and survivors attempted to sue a group of American companies (including Arconic) in their own country. The attempt failed: the court decided it did not have jurisdiction to hear it, and sent the plaintiffs back to UK. The files submitted to support that claim remained had remained sealed by the court.

That was until the team researching the forthcoming Netflix documentary Grenfell: Uncovered submitted a claim to have them unsealed. I have been working on the documentary, and helped pick through and understand the bundle when we finally received it in January.

The first thing we got was confirmation that Perreiah did get the table telling her ACM PE was “flammable” and shouldn’t be used on buildings above 12m in height. Schmidt sent her an email on a separate chain, with “the document made by Claude [Wehrle]”. So she was told - unambiguously - that the PE product the company sold should not be used on tall buildings for fire safety reasons.

But then, just six weeks later, Schmidt sent a business update to the US team, including Perreiah. It was, essentially, boasting about recent successes and included as a second bullet point the sale of 3,600 square metres of PE cladding for use on a project called “Grenfell Towers [sic]”.

So, between June and July 2015, the divisional president in the US was told that:

a) the company was selling a product, ACM PE, which was “flammable” and suitable only for buildings 12m or less in height, and

b) that 3,600 square metres of it had been sold for use on Grenfell. Grenfell is 67m tall, and this size of order is well beyond the ordinary threshold for a building below 12m in height.

But there is no evidence that anyone raised the slightest concern.

Perreiah in her deposition (also released when the documents were unsealed) did not deny that she had seen the email telling her about the sale. But she said she simply skimmed it and missed the detail about Grenfell.

Lawyers acting for bereaved and survivors at the time called this “one of the most canned and rehearsed lines in deposition history” and said it was “self-serving (though not remotely credible) testimony”.

Their case note also says that the US headquarters received “every purchase order” for the cladding sold for use on Grenfell Tower, as well as a monthly sales ledger which included it as the job progressed. But no one intervened to ask why the company’s most flammable product was being sold for a building like this.

In fact, Perreiah was involved in further questions about fire safety because - we learn from these documents - the company had been exploring ways to produce non-combustible cladding panels in France for years. The US (and Perreiah) were aware of this, because they needed to authorise the funds to develop it.

This process had taken a very long time. France had first looked to build in house capacity to produce non-combustible ACM, but had rejected it due to a $20m cost. They’d looked at importing it from China, but rejected it due to a long-lead time. And finally, they decided to spend $1.4m converting an existing production line to handle an imported non-combustible core.

All of this involved requests for funding and project updates to the US. In an email in September 2015, Perreiah called this project “an important part of our growth strategy and the protection of our market”. Evidently, therefore, it was something she was invested in. Note the wording though. Non-combustible cladding was necessary for the protection of our market. Not the humans who might be at risk from a fire in a building clad with the cheaper, flammable stuff.

In the end, it was November 2015 by the time the work to convert a production line to make non-combustible cladding was signed off. It was Perreiah who personally approved it.

In November 2015, before doing so, she viewed a Powerpoint presentation, which shows the maximum heights at which PE can be used. It says that “the trend of the cladding market is an ever increasing use of higher fire retardant class product” and “the higher the building, the stronger the fire resistance must be”.

But still, there is no sign of any questions about where the more combustible cladding was being sold and whether the projects it had been used on were safe.

Now, Arconic says that all of these key documents have already been handed over to the inquiry and Met Police. To the public at large, though, they represent a fresh and very important revelation about what the most senior members of staff in the US-arm of the company knew and when.

It is also fair to say that Ms Perreiah had a large job on her hands: her division contained around 27 autonomously run subsidiaries in 32 facilities in 10 countries, including eight major manufacturing facilities, and over 3,000 employees, which produced hundreds, if not thousands, of different products for different applications, industries, and markets.

In a statement to The Sunday Times - which broke the story (I was part of the team which worked on it) - the company said: “As president of the Alcoa Building and Construction Systems (BCS) Diana Perreiah supported the management of AAP SAS in relation to financial matters and strategic oversight only. She was not responsible for the performance and day-to-day running of the AAP SAS business. The manufacture and sale of Reynobond was controlled by AAP SAS.”

This is all true. But she was told ACM PE was flammable. She was told it shouldn’t be used on tall buildings. And then she was told it had been sold for use on Grenfell. And she did nothing to stop that sale going ahead.

The Netflix documentary, which is responsible for bringing this new information to light, goes live on Friday. You can watch a trailer here.

This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.

If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book Show Me The Bodies. Or you can buy a copy here. My forthcoming book, Homesick, can be preordered here.