Care home inferno
Woman dies as residents – who didn’t know to ring 999 – f led for their lives
A WOMAN with learning difficulties died in a fire at a care home yesterday after neighbours said residents did not know who to call in an emergency.
More than 70 firemen took three hours to put out the blaze, which quickly spread through the home after it started at 2.14am.
By the time emergency crews arrived at Connington Court in Chingford, northeast London, the top floor and roof were on fire. Pictures from the scene showed flames pouring out of the roof.
Eight residents and four carers escaped but one woman, believed to be in her 30s, could not be resuscitated after being found in a bedroom. She was pronounced dead by paramedics. Iain Duncan Smith, the local Tory MP, said a neighbour called 999 because residents ‘didn’t know what the number was’.
The MP for Chingford and Woodford Green described the incident as a ‘terrible tragedy’ and said his ‘heart goes out to the victim’.
‘There’s an investigation going on, so I can’t go too far into it, but [a neighbour] saw all the smoke coming out and saw them all running around the place,’ he said.
‘She asked has anyone called the fire brigade and they said no because they didn’t know what the number was. She called the fire brigade and it was thanks to her swift action, I suspect, that not more than one life was lost.
‘It’s a home that deals with people with learning difficulties, so they are very vulnerable and often need the best kind of protection, and we’ll be wanting to know that a proper investigation takes place to find out what happened.’
The London Fire Brigade, which sent ten crews, said the female resident had died in the blaze by the time they arrived. Twelve people had also already left the home and 16 people were evacuated from neighbouring properties.
Part of the ground and first floors of the care home were damaged by fire and the second floor and roof were destroyed. It is unclear whether the staff also called 999.
Richard Janssens, a manager at Chigwell fire station, said care home staff had ‘desperately tried to evacuate the building’.
He said: ‘The fire was complicated because of the fatality and the fact the roof had caught fire, so it had to be tackled from the inside and outside.’
Neighbour Beryl Smith, 74, was woken by shouting. ‘People from the care home were standing outside looking upset,’ she said. ‘I saw flames shoot along the roof.
‘The residents were in the street for a couple of hours. Some of them were in a bad state and very nervous. It’s so sad.’
The home is run by Sequence Care. Residents who escaped the blaze, the cause of which is unknown, were taken to another of its homes.
A spokesman said: ‘ We are shocked by the death of a resident and our thoughts are with her family. The safety and wellbeing of our residents is always our main concern and while we believe that the processes we have in place to ensure fire safety are robust, in the light of events we are carrying out further checks across all our services.’