A disaster waiting to happen?
"All our warnings fell on deaf ears. We predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time." Grenfell Action Group
BRITAIN: Through the night and deep into the day, the crackling fire raged, sweeping through apartments and destroying lives like an out-of-control inferno from an earlier century, or perhaps from a less affluent part of the world.
But this was London. This was 2017. And the Grenfell Tower fire was unlike any seen here in recent memory, a blaze that transformed a 24-storey high-rise that was once home to about 500 people into a charred ruin on the city’s otherwise gleaming skyline.
The fire marked a fresh trauma in a city already roiled by terrorist attacks, an unhappy and divisive political campaign, and the lingering uncertainty over Brexit.
But it was also, residents of the public housing development bitterly said, the specific and predictable result of years of warnings that had gone unheeded; an emblem of a city that is neglecting its most vulnerable residents even as it increasingly caters to the whims of the ultra-rich.
In one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods of London - a short amble from the homes of celebrities and royals - people living in one of the city’s increasingly in-demand havens of affordable housing jumped from 20 floors up after being trapped by the advancing flames.
Police said yesterday 12 people had died and more than 70 had been injured. But with many people still unaccounted for, the toll was almost certain to rise.
Authorities said the investigation would take time to assess what officials hinted could amount to a series of failures that, together, amounted to what London Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton described as ‘‘an unprecedented incident’’.
Residents who survived praised firefighters but blamed the fire on official neglect. They said they had repeatedly raised fire safety concerns, which they said included the building’s inadequate escape routes, the absence of an integrated alarm system, and a renovation last year that they worried had left their building clad in panels that were shiny and new but not up to code.
‘‘Anyone who earns below £10 million is not human in this borough,’’ said James Wood, a resident of an adjacent public housing development who claimed that he and people from Grenfell Tower had lobbied the local council to take the issue seriously, to no avail. ‘‘They don’t care about fire safety.’’
The web page of the Grenfell Action Group, a residents’ organisation, testified to the long-standing concerns, with blog entries stretching back years that warned of the dangers.
‘‘All our warnings fell on deaf ears,’’ the group said in a post added after the fire broke out. ‘‘We predicted that a catastrophe like this was inevitable and just a matter of time.’’
The target of the group’s ire the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which runs public housing in the area on behalf of the local council issued a statement in which it acknowledged that residents had earlier raised concerns and vowed to ‘‘co-operate fully with all the relevant authorities in order to ascertain the cause of this tragedy’’.
Nick Paget-brown, who leads the council, also acknowledged that residents had had longstanding concerns, though he did not discuss them specifically.
Paget-brown told the BBC that there would be ‘‘a thorough investigation into why the fire started and why it spread so quickly’’.
Although officials would not speculate, experts said yesterday their focus was on the building’s exterior cladding, which is supposed to be fireproof but which witnesses said had burned like paper, quickly spreading the fire from unit to unit and from floor to floor.
The first hint that something was wrong came just before 1am local time when, according to a fourth-floor resident interviewed by the BBC, a neighbour knocked on the door to say his ‘‘fridge had exploded’’.
Experts said firefighters should have had time to extinguish the blaze before it spread to other units. Instead, it leapt within minutes to other floors - but somehow never triggered any buildingwide alarms.
Muslim residents of Grenfell Tower, who were awake during the night because they were observing Ramadan, helped to save lives as the deadly fire tore through the block, witnesses say.
A local woman said more people would have died if not for the actions of a number of Muslim boys who knocked on doors, yelling in an attempt to alert residents in the absence of fire alarms.
‘‘If it wasn’t for all these young Muslims, young boys round here, coming from mosques ... people would have [died]. A lot more people would have [died],’’ she said. ’’People want to talk about them when they do wrong, and all this sort of thing, when they’re doing bad - but when they’re doing good ...
‘‘They were the first people with bags of water, giving to people and helping people - running and telling people.’’
During the fasting month of Ramadan, Muslims do not eat during daylight, instead staying up late and getting up early to do so.
Another resident told The Huffington Post that the young Muslims made the difference for a number of sleeping families. ’’They ran around knocking on people’s doors,’’ she said. ‘‘Thank God for Ramadan.’’
Khalid Suleman Ahmed, 20, who moved to the eighth floor of Grenfell Tower not long ago, said he had stayed up to eat before daylight fasting began about 4.45am.
‘‘No fire alarms went off and there were no warning. I was playing Playstation, waiting to eat suhur [the meal that begins the fast], then smelt smoke. I got up and looked out of my window and saw the seventh floor smoking,’’ he said.
‘‘I would be up this late on a Friday night possibly, but never a random midweek night unless it was Ramadan.
‘‘There are a lot of Muslims living there and people choose up to stay up and wait, so it was certainly a factor for me and others. It probably did save lives.’’
- Washington Post, Fairfax