Survivors fight for their families
Survivors of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and bereaved families called for fire chiefs to be sacked and prosecuted over failings identified in the official report into the fire.
Flanked by candles and pictures of their loved ones, they told a press conference that they believed senior members of the London Fire Brigade (LFB) were trying to avoid any blame for the deaths of 72 people in the disaster on June 14, 2017.
Sir Martin Moore-Bick, the retired judge who chaired the public inquiry into the fire, said he had identified ‘‘serious shortcomings in the response of the London Fire Brigade, both in the operation of the control room and on the incident ground’’.
He said the ‘‘stay put’’ strategy, in which residents are told to remain in their homes if the fire is contained in a single flat, should have been dropped between 1.30am and 1.50am when it was clear the fire was out of control.
This would have resulted in ‘‘fewer fatalities’’, he said. The advice was not dropped until 2.47am.
Moore-Bick said that the LFB was in danger of failing to learn the lessons of the tragedy and accused Dany Cotton, its commissioner, of ‘‘remarkable insensitivity’’ after she told the inquiry that she would not change anything that the fire service did that night. Cotton, who will retire next year at 50 on a pension estimated to be worth £2 million (NZ$4m), told the inquiry that no training could have prepared the crews for the fire.
Yesterday she defied calls to resign, telling the BBC: ‘‘I will retire in six months’ time because my commitment is to making those changes, and if I resign I can’t do that.’’
Hamdan El Alami, 70, survived the inferno along with his five-year-old grandchild. His daughter, her husband and two grandchildren, eight and six months, died. Alami wept as he pointed to a photo of his daughter and asked ‘‘why?’’ ‘‘This is my family. I came here to fight for our families. Please, please support us,’’ he said.
Six members of Nabil Choucair’s family also died.
He was among those to call for a prosecution and said senior firefighters were ‘‘still trying to put [all] the blame on the cladding’’ when they should have evacuated the building sooner.
The inquiry found that the LFB’s preparation and planning for a high-rise cladding fire, identified as a potential threat several years earlier, was ‘‘gravely inadequate’’.
Shah Aghlani, whose mother Sakina Afrasehabi and aunt Fatemeh Afrasiabi died, compared Ms Cotton’s assertion that she would not do anything differently to a military general defending a heavy defeat. ‘‘There has to be a complete overhaul of the system. If there isn’t change, this will happen again and again,’’ he said. – The Times