This is clearly a massive over simplification, but...
Blocks of this type were not designed for evacuation in case of fire. They were designed such that a fire in any flat would be contained there for a minimum period of time, whilst that flat could be evacuated the other residents would stay put and the fire brigade would use the stairs to get access to it and deal with it.
The fire brigade knows this and therefore the default strategy is not to evacuate immediately.
For reasons we now more or less know, the containment did not work at Grenfell. In fact, as built and particularly as clad, it could have been designed to transfer the fire from flat to flat rather than to isolate it.
At what point should the officer in charge have (a) realised this, and (b) acted on it, if they should have acted at all?
If the answer to (a) is "as soon as they heard it was Grenfell Tower" then something, somewhere in the fire service is wrong. Either the service had not heeded information that was already known, or had not disseminated it and incorporated it into procedures for specific buildings with this problem, or the OIC on the day did not do his or her job properly.
I can only assume as I haven't read it that that is what the report determines. My recollection is that experts, who had been campaigning for something to be done about the cladding problem, were well aware of the risks before the fire occurred.
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