London fire: cladding ‘fuelled blaze’ in tower block
Amid tales of carnage inside Grenfell Tower, one story of hope as partially blind man is rescued after 11 hours from fire that killed several people.
With smoke still swirling around the charred remains of Grenfell Tower in west London, residents and community leaders are demanding to know how a ferocious fire could have swept through the high-rise block of flats with such speed.
The anger was particularly strong since activists had warned just seven months ago that fire safety procedures were so lax that only a catastrophic blaze would bring the scrutiny needed to make the building safe.
Officials warn the death toll, now standing at 17, may escalate dramatically.
Scores of people, mainly from the top three floors of the blackened building in North Kensington remain unaccounted for, and 74 people, including 18 in a critical condition remain in London hospitals.
Cladding ‘fuelled blaze’ in tower block
A community leader believes the death toll could be severe: ‘We have a list of missing people — there are so many. It’s possible there are more than 50, possibly hundreds.’’
In a rare heartwarming story to emerge from the horrendous fire, the partially sighted man, believed to be elderly and a 30-year resident of the tower block, was finally rescued at noon, well after the fire began just before 1am. He had been filmed by photographers and cameramen for hours waving and praying from his 11th floor window, which was on the north side of the building, which had some cladding structure intact.
Just before lunch the man was seen being rescued by firefighters, who carried him to safety, protecting him and them, with riot shields from the falling debris and hot ash. His condition is now unknown and he is believed to be in hospital.
But scores of others who had been screaming for help from the windows in the early hours, trapped by heavy smoke and intense heat, with the only stairwell on fire, may not have made it out.
As it happened: Yesterday’s live coverage of the London fire.
Earlier families had thrown young children from the burning building, including one young child who was hurled from around the ninth floor and caught by a man below.
Samira Lamrani said she saw a woman dropping the baby from a window “on the ninth or 10th floor” to waiting members of the public below.
“People were starting to appear at the windows, frantically banging and screaming,” she said.
Firefighters had rescued people from the lower floors, including seven from the seventh floor as late as 6am, but it was then feared that the structure of the building, coupled with the intensity of the fire, meant there would be no more survivors.
Various family members and residents of the building told The Australian they had been able to speak to their loved ones for several hours after the blaze began. One estate resident Michael said he was still talking to his friend Steve on the 23rd floor as late as 5am but had heard nothing since and he feared the worst.
Residents who ignored the fire department advice to stay inside their homes, instead rushing down the darkened smoky stairwell before it was engulfed in fire, say acting quickly saved their lives.
Yet some of the 200 firefighters and scores of police, on the scene within six minutes of the alarm being raised, were advising residents to stay put reassuring them they would be rescued.
Jamal Ali, 28, said his aunt, Zainab Ali, had been told to stay in her flat but she fled down the stairs with five children.
“The police were telling her to stay inside, but she ran down the stairs with her kids and managed to get away — otherwise she’d be dead,’’ he said.
Another resident Adam Ali said the fire roared up the side of the building and within 15 minutes had infiltrated the nearside, engulfing nearly all of the 120 flats.
”It was like throwing kerosene on a fire, it went whoosh,’’ he said.
Grenfell’s residents say their repeated warnings about ‘appalling’ fire safety was ignored by landlord Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO).
Several shocked residents who were evacuated by police have told The Australian that the fire was believed to have started on the fourth floor but the theories for the fire have ranged from a faulty fridge in one particular flat to a deliberate act of sabotage in the stairwell.
While the building continued to smoulder, frantic family and friends scoured the makeshift emergency centres and hospitals to try and find loved ones. Two school teachers arrived searching for children that hadn’t turned up to class. Others turned to social media for information.
Mariem Elgwahry was last heard from on the 19th floor of the tower with her mother at 2.30am.
Politician David Tammy was worried about a photographer friend Khadija Saye. He said Saye was on Facebook messenger saying she was unable to get out of the flat for the thick smoke.
”She was saying she just can’t get out and ‘Please pray for me. There’s a fire in my council block. I can’t leave the flat. Please pray for me and my mum.’
“At one point she said she’d just tried to leave again and said it was impossible. She said she felt like she was going to faint. Someone asked ‘Did you try going down low with towels?’ She said ‘Yes, it’s in my room’. I’m assuming she meant the smoke.”
Twelve-year-old Jessica Urbano is also missing and was last heard when she rang relatives from the stairwell on the 20th floor.
Relatives are also desperately searching for 82 year-old Ali Yawar Jafari, from flat 205, who got out of the lift when it stopped at the 10th floor because he couldn’t breathe for the smoke.
Saber Neda, 57, lived on the top-floor and was slowed down because of an injury, but his wife Shakila, 45, and son Farhad, 24, managed to get to the ground floor and have been admitted to hospital. Mr Neda rang a relative at 2.20am to say he was in the kitchen and there was no help.
Nura Jamal, sent a message to her friend just after 2am saying: “Forgive me, the fire is here, I’m dying.” There are concerns for two of her children, aged six and 11 but a daughter is believed to have escaped the fire.
Nadia Choucair, a teaching assistant, is understood to have lived in flat 193 on one of the top floors of the tower with her husband, Malak, three daughters and her mother in law. One of her daughters rang a friend and said that she didn’t think she was going to make it out. The girl, aged about 13 told her friend: ‘We are not going to make it, I love you’.
Ranya Ibrahim, 30, and her two young children aged three and five have not been heard of since sending a snapchat message to a friend.
Hesham Reman, 57, lives on the 19th floor and rang his nephew at 1.30am telling him the police had told him to put a wet towel under the door.
‘’He was getting really worried because the smoke was coming in. Then the phone went dead.” his nephew Karim Musilly said.
Fears are also held for Sheila Smith, 84, who lives on the 16th floor, Tony Disson, on the 10th floor and Raymond and Karen Bernard, who lived in flat 201,
A public relations firm has also tweeted with concerns about an employee Mo Tuccu believed to have been visiting friends at Grenfell.
Cladding ‘fuelled blaze’
Firefighters described scenes of “carnage and utter destruction’’ inside London’s 24-storey Grenfell Tower apartments, where “a lot of residents” who had been advised to stay and wait for help were unaccounted for following an inferno yesterday apparently fuelled by new insulated cladding.
Residents of the north Kensington tower’s 120 flats screamed for help for hours after the blaze broke out just before 1am (10am AEST). Some used bedsheets tied together to try to scale down the building. Others jumped.
As it happened: Yesterday’s live coverage of the London fire.
Witnesses described seeing the frantic waving of residents, who were previously warned in the event of a blaze to cover doorways and wait in their apartments, which they were told would be fireproof for an hour, fade as smoke and flames reached their flats.
Police said at least 12 people had been killed, but the toll is expected to rise.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said “a lot of residents” were unaccounted for, including children. A woman with six children on the 21st floor got to the bottom to discover two of them weren’t with her and were now missing, London radio reported.
At one evacuation centre, Francis Deen was desperately searching for his sister Zainab Deen and two-year-old nephew, last seen on the 14th floor.
Mr Deen said his sister had tried to find refuge in a neighbour’s flat on that level at number 113, and he last spoke to her at 4am, when she told him her son had collapsed from the smoke. “I told her ‘give him mouth-to-mouth’, but I haven’t heard from her since. It’s not good,” he told The Australian.
One woman said her aunt and uncle and four cousins lived on the 17th floor and she had spoken to them for an hour until 2.45am. Her uncle was disabled and in a wheelchair. Her aunt and the four girls had decided to stay together with him, believing the fire service would rescue them.
‘’We wanted them to get out but they couldn’t carry uncle, so they all decided to stay together and wait and now, look at the building, there is no way they survived,” the woman said. “My aunt was panicking but what do they do? They can’t get down the stairs, they can’t carry my uncle, they are trapped.’’
Police said 74 people were injured, 20 of them critically, and London fire chief Dany Cotton said the scale of the blaze was “unprecedented”.
While investigators said it was too early to determine a cause, residents blamed new £2.6 million ($4.4m) aluminium composite cladding — installed to make the building more energy efficient — for aiding the blaze’s rapid spread.
The tower, built in 1974, had only just been renovated at a total cost of £8.7m. Locals said it used to have three fire exits, but now had only one. A residents’ action group had warned of fire safety failings and the potential for catastrophe for more than a year. The company that renovated the tower last year said the work complied with fire safety standards and health and safety regulation.
Resident Mark Thomas, 46, said he helped firefighters knock on doors to alert neighbours. He believed the fire started on the fourth floor, perhaps in or close by the stairwell, which quickly became smoke-logged. “There is only one set of stairs from the top and my friend Steve, he is on the 23rd floor,” he told The Australian just after 5am.
“You can see that the building is totally gone, so I think he is gone now too … Where was the helicopter with the water to drop on the top? The place went up in less than an hour, in half an hour the whole side was on fire and people were jumping out windows, and a few got out early.”
Jody Martin raced from his nearby home and ran up to the second floor, banging on doors to alert residents to get out.
“I saw a lady on the middle floors holding her toddler outside (the window), screaming for help,” Mr Martin, who spoke with an Australian accent, told the BBC.
He said he saw a family of three waving from a window on the top floor, but “one at a time they were not at the window at all”.
A fireman from Euston station, one of 60 units that attended, said at 5am he had rescued seven people from the seventh floor. “It is carnage, utter devastation, it’s horrible, but we have got some people out,’’ he said.
Michael Paramasivani, 37, said he had only escaped the inferno by ignoring advice to stay inside his seventh-floor flat. He said he was awake at 1am and smelt something electrical burning. After scouring his flat for his Kindle and phone and discovering they were okay, he lit a cigarette and casually looked through his peephole and got an enormous shock.
“There were people running and screaming, so I got me bird and the little one and just legged it down the fire escape,” he said.
“It was busy, people were overtaking me from above because I was carrying the little ’un, but it was very dark and very smoky. I heard that the fire well was closed soon after because the fire got hold in there, so think we were very, very lucky. If I had listened to the advice, to put a wet towel under the door and wait for the firemen, we would all be dead.”
Grenfell Action Group said warnings on its blog over more than a year of a catastrophe in the event of a fire had fallen on “deaf ears”, amid questions about the cladding and lack of fire escapes.
Aluminium composite cladding has fuelled blazes in apartment fires around the world — including one in Melbourne in 2014, where a blaze took 11 minutes to race up a Docklands apartment block — and there are new cladding standards in Dubai after a series of high-rise fires.
Plans on the website of the architecture firm that worked on the Grenfell Tower renovation show aluminium composite material rainscreen was used, as well as an aluminium cassette rain screen.
Residents blamed the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for the fire, saying it had taken no notice of concerns about the building’s cladding. The estate is managed by the council, which described the renovations on its website: “The large-scale works included the installation of insulated exterior cladding, new double-glazed windows and a new communal heating system.”
Improved energy efficiency would reduce living costs, it said.
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