12 DIE IN MIDNIGHT TOWER BLAZE IN LONDON
Residents screamed for help from windows, some tried to throw children to safety as flames raced through the 24-storey highrise
london — A deadly overnight fire raced through a 24-storey apartment tower i n London on Wednesday, killing at least 12 people and injuring 74 others, police said. Witnesses reported seeing residents throw babies and small children from high windows to people on the sidewalk in a desperate effort to save them from the flames.
The inferno lit up the night sky and spewed black smoke from the windows of the Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, where more than 200 firefighters battled the blaze. A plume of smoke stretched for miles across the sky after dawn, revealing the blackened, flamelicked wreckage of the building, which was still burning over 12 hours later.
People trapped by the quickly advancing flames and thick smoke banged on windows and screamed for help to those watching down below, witnesses and survivors said. One resident said the fire alarm did not go off.
“The flames, I have never seen anything like it, it just reminded me of 9/11,” said Muna Ali, 45. “The fire started on the upper floors ... oh my goodness, it spread so quickly. It had completely spread within half an hour.”
“This is an unprecedented incident,” Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton told reporters. “In my 29 years of being a firefighter I have never, ever seen anything of this scale.” She said she feared more victims would be found still inside the building.
There was no immediate word on the cause of the blaze, but angry residents said they had warned local authorities about fire issues at Grenfell Tower. The subsidized housing block of 120 apartments was built in 1974 and was recently upgraded at a cost of 8.6 million pounds ($11 million), with work finishing in May 2016, according to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Samira Lamrani, a witness, said one woman dropped a baby from a window on the ninth or 10th floor to people on the sidewalk.
“People were starting to appear at the windows, frantically banging and screaming” and one woman indicated she was going to drop the baby, Lamrani told Britain’s Press Association news agency. “A gentleman ran forward and managed to grab the baby.”
Joe Walsh, 58, said he saw someone throw two children out of a window from the fifth or sixth floor. Tiago Etienne, 17, said he spotted about three children between the ages of four and eight being dropped from an apartment around the 15th floor.
A woman lost two of her six children when trying to escape a burn- ing tower block, the witnesses said. Bystanders and residents reported scenes of panic.
“Everyone was in shock, everyone was fleeing, screaming,” Michael Paramasivan, a resident of the block, told BBC radio.
“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,” he added.
A bystander, Samira Lamrani, said she saw a baby thrown from a ninth or 10th floor window.
“People were starting to appear at the windows, frantically banging and screaming,” she told London’s Evening Standard newspaper.
“The windows were slightly ajar, a woman was gesturing that she was about to throw her baby and if somebody could catch her baby. Somebody did, a gentleman ran forward and managed to grab the baby,” Lamrani continued.
Another witness, Tamara, told the BBC she also saw people trying to throw their children to safety.
“There’s people, like, throwing their kids out: ‘Just save my children, just save my children!’,” she said. “There’s people at their windows: ‘Help me, help me, help me!’ You can see the fire go into the house and into the last room that they’re in, and just engulfing their whole apartment.” Police commander Stuart Cundy gave the death toll of six but added the figure was likely to rise “during what will be a complex recovery operation over a number of days.”
Paul Woodrow, head of operations for the London Ambulance
There are people at their windows: ‘Help me, help me, help me!’ You can see the fire go into the house and into the last room that they’re in, and just engulfing their whole apartment
Service, said 20 of the injured were in critical condition.
The London Fire Brigade received the first reports of the fire at 12:54 a.m. and the first engines arrived within six minutes, Cotton said. Witnesses described a white, polystyrene-type material falling like snow from the building as it burned. Some feared the charred tower block might collapse, but a structural engineer said the building was not in danger, according to the London Fire Brigade, which added “it is safe for our crews to be in there.” — AP , Reuters