A systemic failure in public housing safety
Of the 95 buildings whose cladding has now been tested for combustibility on behalf of the government, all have failed to be passed as adequately fire proof.
But that is not the most shocking statistic.
The most shocking finding is that 75 of those 95 failures are what's known as Category 3 failures.
That means the core of the cladding - the material sandwiched between two aluminum sheets - is worryingly inflammable.
The other 20 failures are Category 2 failures, or cladding whose core is a little more fire resistant.
Now according to officials, Category 2 failures are a bit less serious - because if they are on buildings designed in other ways to prevent the spread of fire, the mere presence of the cladding may not be intrinsically too dangerous (the installation of sufficient numbers of fire doors or sprinkler systems might be mitigating or offsetting factors, for example).
But it is simply jaw-droppingly appalling that at least 75 buildings have been fitted with cladding whose core is in the highest risk category of combustibility.
The implication is that the cladding should never have been used in any sensible or lawful circumstances.
That said the government has not yet concluded that all this cladding needs to be removed immediately. It is assessing whether the 75 blocks have other fire prevention measures or systems in place before making that decision.
Even so, the 75 buildings may be the tip of the iceberg - as there are another 500 odd buildings whose cladding has not yet been assessed.
So it is surely clear beyond reasonable doubt that there is a systemic problem with the quality and safety of cladding used on council tower blocks (unless you believe that the tests are wrong - which seems implausible).
And where there is a systemic problem there is usually a systemic cause.
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the competing hypotheses for the systemic cause are:
inadequate regulations;
inadequate supervision of whatever regulations existed - which may have been compounded by the 2010 coalition government's war on supposedly unnecessary red tape, combined with austerity and pressure on the public sector to cut costs;
local government incompetence;
a governance system that diffused responsibility for fire safety such that the fire-safety buck in practice stopped with no one;
corruption.
Which of these theoretical causes is the actual cause? Ministers, officials and experts insist it's too early to say.
But - if the pathology of past systemic crises is any guide - what went wrong will be a mixture of the wrong or absent rules and a culture where no one was clearly and obviously responsible for keeping tenants safe.