Fire engulfed a 24-story housing block in central London early yesterday, killing at least six people and injuring 74 others in an inferno that trapped residents as they slept.
Some residents screamed for help from behind upper-floor windows, while others tried to throw children to safety, as flames raced through the high-rise Grenfell Tower block of apartments in the north Kensington area after taking hold just before 1am.
“We could see a lot of children and parents screaming: ‘Help! Help! Help!’ and putting their hands on the window and asking to help them,” witness Amina Sharif told reporters. “We could do nothing and we could see the stuff on the side was falling off, collapsing. We were just standing screaming and they were screaming.”
Photo: AP
Another witness, Saimar Lleshi, saw people tying together sheets in an attempt to escape.
“I saw three people putting sheets together to climb down, but no one climbed down. I don’t know what happened to them,” Lleshi said. “Even when the lights went off, people were waving with white shirts to be seen.”
More than 200 firefighters, backed up by 40 fire engines, fought for hours to try to bring the blaze, one of the biggest seen in central London in memory, under control.
Photo: Reuters
By midday, London police said six people had been killed, warning that the death toll was likely to rise.
Police Commander Stuart Cundy said a “recovery operation” could take some time and that there could be people in the building who are unaccounted for, although he would not be drawn on a figure.
Firefighters still had to reach the top four floors of the building where several hundred people live in 130 apartments.
The cause of the inferno, which left the tower block a charred, smoking shell, was not immediately known.
The block had recently undergone an £8.7 million (US$11.13 million) refurbishment of the exterior, which included new external cladding and replacement windows.
Black smoke billowed high into the air for hours after the blaze broke out. Residents rushed to escape through smoke-filled corridors after being woken up by the smell of smoke.
The London Fire Brigade said the fire engulfed all floors from the second to the top of the 24-story block.
There were reports that some residents leaped out of windows to escape the flames.
One woman lost two of her six children as she tried to escape from the block, one witness said.
“I spoke to a lady that lives on the 21st floor. She has got six kids. She left with all six of them. When she got downstairs there was only four of them with her. She is now breaking her heart,” block resident Michael Paramasivan told BBC radio.
Other witnesses spoke of children, including a baby, being thrown to safety, from windows high up.
One witness, Tamara, told the BBC: “There’s people, like, throwing their kids out: ‘Just save my children, just save my children!’”
“In my 29 years of being a firefighter, I have never ever seen anything of this scale,” London Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton told reporters.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan said the fire raised questions over safety of high-rise blocks such as Grenfell Tower.
The BBC reported that a political deal between the government of British Prime Minister Theresa May and a small Northern Irish party could be delayed because of the aftermath of the fire.
More than 12 hours after the fire broke out, the building was still smoldering, although the building was not in danger of collapse.
Firefighters rescued large numbers of people — some of them in their pajamas — from the 43-year-old block, a low-rent housing estate that overlooks upscale parts of the Kensington area.
Burning debris cascaded from the blazing building.
“There was bits of building falling off all around me, I scalded my shin on a hot piece of metal that had fallen off the building,” said Jodie Martin, who lives close to the building and had gone to the scene to try to help.
“I was just screaming at people: ‘Get out, get out’ and they were screaming back at me: ‘We can’t, the corridors are full of smoke,’” he told BBC Radio.
Residents said they had warned repeatedly over fire safety in the block.
Khan said questions needed to be answered over the safety of tower blocks after some residents said they had been advised they should stay in their apartments in the event of a fire.
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