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.
CHIPMAKING INVESTMENT: J.W. Kuo told legislators that Department of Investment Review approval would be needed were Washington to seek a TSMC board seat Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said he received information about a possible US government investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and an assessment of the possible effect on the firm requires further discussion. If the US were to invest in TSMC, the plan would need to be reviewed by the Department of Investment Review, Kuo told reporters ahead of a hearing of the legislature’s Economics Committee. Kuo’s remarks came after US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said that the US government is looking into the federal government taking equity stakes in computer chip manufacturers that
NORTHERN STRIKE: Taiwanese military personnel have been training ‘in strategic and tactical battle operations’ in Michigan, a former US diplomat said More than 500 Taiwanese troops participated in this year’s Northern Strike military exercise held at Lake Michigan by the US, a Pentagon-run news outlet reported yesterday. The Michigan National Guard-sponsored drill involved 7,500 military personnel from 36 nations and territories around the world, the Stars and Stripes said. This year’s edition of Northern Strike, which concluded on Sunday, simulated a war in the Indo-Pacific region in a departure from its traditional European focus, it said. The change indicated a greater shift in the US armed forces’ attention to a potential conflict in Asia, it added. Citing a briefing by a Michigan National Guard senior
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
ENHANCED SECURITY: A Japanese report said that the MOU is about the sharing of information on foreign nationals entering Japan from Taiwan in the event of an emergency The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday confirmed that Taiwan and Japan had signed an agreement to promote information exchanges and cooperation on border management, although it did not disclose more details on the pact. Ministry spokesman Hsiao Kuang-wei (蕭光偉) said the ministry is happy to see that the two nations continue to enhance cooperation on immigration control, in particular because Taiwan and Japan “share a deep friendship and frequent people-to-people exchanges.” “Last year, more than 7.32 million visits were made between the two countries, making it even more crucial for both sides to work closer on immigration and border control,” he said. Hsiao
RSS