Fire chiefs should have got us out
Volunteer who saved his neighbours slams decision not to evacuate Grenfell
A FORMER volunteer fireman who saved his children and neighbours during the Grenfell Tower disaster said yesterday that he was astonished fire chiefs decided not to evacuate the building.
Miguel Alves, 50, who was one of the first residents to detect the blaze, frantically cleared the entire 13th floor of the building before it became a smoke-filled ‘trap’.
Giving evidence to the public inquiry into the fire, he piled pressure on the London Fire Brigade over its ‘stay put’ advice to residents by insisting that fire crews had enough time to evacuate residents on higher floors.
Mr Alves accused the first fire crews of standing idly by as cladding that had been fitted to the outside of the building during a £9million council refurbishment fell like ‘plastic rain’.
Describing how the horror unfolded, the chauffeur accused the brigade of failing to act quickly when the building’s cladding went up ‘like petrol’, adding that evacuation was the ‘only choice’.
He said: ‘It seemed clear that the fire brigade should have gone to the top of the tower, knocked on all the doors and got people out.
‘There was still enough time to evacuate the building and it was clear the fire could not be stopped and that this was the only choice. It was out of control within minutes and I could see the fire hoses could not reach high enough and could not stop it.’
The fire was in its early stages when Mr Alves returned to the tower in North Kensington, west London, at 12.50am on June 14 last year with his wife Fatima, 49, after taking relatives visiting from South Africa back to their hotel.
Two men got into the lift with them as they were about to take it to their flat on the 13th floor. It was only when the men got out on the fourth floor that Mr Alves noticed a thin layer of smoke clinging to the ceiling.
After telling his wife to go outside, he dashed upstairs to the family’s flat, where he ordered his son Tiago, 21, who was watching television, and daughter Ines, 17, who was sleeping before a GCSE
exam the next morning, to leave. Mr Alves, who moved to London from Portugal with his wife in 1992, also banged on the doors of the other six flats on the floor.
‘I wish I had the same strength to go to the top floor and bring everybody down,’ he said. Mr Alves, who previously volunteered as a fireman tackling wildfires in Portugal, said he ‘completely ignored’ fire safety advice within the building urging residents to stay inside their flats.
He said: ‘[My thought] was to save myself, because if [the] fire is on the fourth floor, I’m on the 13th floor, why should I be in the trap when I have the opportunity to come out?’
The Grenfell fire, which killed 72, was the worst blaze on British soil since the Second World War. The inquiry continues.