The British government was under pressure Wednesday night to review fire safety measures in residential tower blocks following the fire at Grenfell Tower in west London.
Policing and fire minister Nick Hurd acknowledged that the fire raised important questions about safety which must be answered but insisted that the immediate priority must be to take care of those affected by the tragedy.
“I hope people will understand that the priority of the government at the moment is to manage the emergency response, to deal with the security, to deal with lives to be saved, lives to be rebuilt, and to make sure that we have got the support in place for this emergency response,” he said.
“That will then move into recovery phase and then we will move into a phase where we seek to answer the questions that people quite understandably have, so we really understand what happened here, what went wrong, so we don’t find ourselves in this situation, because I don’t think that anybody wants to go through another night like last night.”
Grenfell Tower was part of Lancaster West Estate, a social housing complex of 1,000 homes in West Kensington, and was home to between 400 and 600 people, many of whom were still unaccounted for last night.
Resident Mickey Paramasivan, who was woken in his seventh-floor flat by a smell of burning plastic, said he had witnessed awful scenes as he escaped with his girlfriend and daughter.
“I opened the front door, there’s smoke everywhere, there’s all neighbours running out. ‘Get down the stairs’ they’re shouting,” he said.
“If we had stayed in that flat we’d have perished. It spread like wildfire because it was covered in cladding. The smoke alarm was useless. I could only hear it in the hallway, not in the flat. It was horrendous.
“There were people who were lost, people who can’t find their families. There was one woman on the 12th floor, she’s left with her six kids, when she’s got to the ground floor there’s only four of them with her.”
Screams
Paul Munakr, who lived on the seventh floor, told Sky News that no fire alarm sounded and he was only alerted to the fire by the screams of residents pleading for help and others telling them not to jump. He said he had never witnessed a fire alarm test at the block.
“They only do these fire alarms in the day when the majority of people are working,” he said.
Residential tower blocks are supposed to be designed in a way that will compartmentalise the blaze to stop it spreading and, by slowing down the spread of a fire, allow the emergency services to deal with any incident quickly.
London's mayor, Sadiq Khan, remarked on the speed with which the fire spread and the warnings about safety from residents over recent months.
“All of these are questions which must be answered, if for no other reason than because there are many, many other tower blocks across London and across the country,” he said.
Grenfell Action Group, which advocates for residents in the block, claimed in a blog last November that Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation was ignoring their fears about fire safety.
“All our warnings fell on deaf ears and we predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time,” the group said.
The management organisation said yesterday it was too early to speculate what caused the fire and contributed to its spread.
“We are aware that concerns have been raised historically by residents. We always take all concerns seriously and these will form part of our forthcoming investigations,” it said.
