‘People helped each other – some went back towards the fire’
Neighbours save lives by knocking on doors; blind man rescued after 12 hours; and survivor sits exam
‘I was lucky because when I opened the fire escape, there were two men going down. They put me on their shoulders’
AMID the horrifying tales of death and desperation at the Grenfell Tower came stories of astonishing resilience, hope and survival.
Ines Alves, 16, fled her 13th floor flat after her father, Miguel, a chauffeur, woke her and her brother just after 1am, urging them to leave by the stairs.
She took refuge at a friend’s house overnight before making her way to Sacred Heart School in Hammersmith on Wednesday to sit an exam at 9am, wearing the clothes she had fled in.
“I put on my jeans and a top and just grabbed my phone and chemistry notes,” she said. “I was trying to revise while we waited downstairs as we thought it was a small fire at first, but it was impossible.
“It was chemistry GCSE and that’s what I want to do in my A-levels next year so I thought maybe it was necessary to do it. It was still really shocking and it hadn’t hit me yet.
“It still hasn’t completely hit me that we’ve lost our house.”
Mr Alves, who is thought to have saved dozens of lives by banging on his neighbours’ doors to wake them, said he was “very proud” of his daughter.
Ines’s brother Tiago, a physics student at King’s College in London, revealed that it was only because the family had been out for dinner that they had, by chance, arrived home late and noticed the smoke in the lift.
“If it wasn’t for that, we would have just slept through,” he said.
When they got to the fourth floor, they reached firefighters. “We asked if everything was OK,” he added. “They said, ‘You don’t need to leave but now you have, you may as well go outside.’”
Khalid Ahmed, 20, was credited with saving the lives of many on the eighth floor after he frantically woke them.
The quick-thinking engineering student was counting down the minutes to the break of the Ramadan fast, when he first smelled burning.
He shook his aunt awake before running out into the smoke-filled hall and banging on neighbours’ doors.
“No fire alarms went off and there was no warning,” he said.
Khalid’s aunt, Amina Mohamed, 46, said: “He saved us all.
“If it was not for Ramadan, he would not have been awake and we would all have been asleep as the fire grew. We owe him our lives.”
Sidani Atmani, 41, made it to safety from the 15th floor, but only after trying to help a disabled man get down the stairs.
“Everyone was helping each other and some people were even going back upstairs, back towards the fire,” he said.
“I tried to help one disabled guy who was on crutches who kept saying, ‘Just go, run.’”
Clarita Ghavimi, 66, a grandmother who had lived in the tower for 34 years, was rescued from the 10th floor by brave neighbours who battled through thick smoke to carry her down stairs.
“Three times I opened the door and the smoke pushed me inside, so I closed it again,” she said. “I managed to phone my son, but there were no words coming from my mouth.
“I was lucky because when I opened the fire escape, there were two men going down. They put me on their shoulders so I didn’t have to walk. It was amazing.”
Ms Ghavimi said she still did not know the identities of the men who rescued her.
The partially blind grandfather who desperately waved for help from his window was miraculously rescued 12 hours after the fire took hold.
Elpidio Bonifacio captured the nation’s heart as his terrifying plight was broadcast live on television.
Astonishingly, long after it was assumed that anyone who remained in the building had perished, Mr Bonifacio was carried down alive.
The father-of-two is now in a coma with severe smoke inhalation.
His son Gordon Bonifacio paid tribute on Facebook to “the bravery of the fire teams” but said his father, who is in his 70s, was “not out of the woods yet”.