People should’ve been saved, say fire survivors
A GRENFELL Tower survivor has told the inquiry into the tragedy that “people’s lives could have been saved”.
Fatima Alves’s testimony came after Antonio Roncolato, a resident who was trapped in his 10th-floor flat during the fire, told of how “numerous” 999 calls were made about his position but he was only rescued more than four hours later after he rang his son who passed the phone to an officer on the ground.
Mrs Alves and Mr Roncolato are the first of dozens survivors of the fire due to give evidence over the next month, returning the focus of the hearing to residents and those who lost family and friends after months of testimony from experts and firefighters.
Asked at the end of her evidence if she had any final words for Sir Martin Moore-bick, the chairman, Mrs Alves said: “The people’s lives could have been saved if they were evacuated.”
Mrs Alves and her husband arrived home at 1am on June 14 2017 and noticed smoke on the fourth floor. She left the building while Miguel, her husband, went to their 13th-floor flat to evacuate their children. Unaware that firefighters had advised residents to “stay put”, Mr Alves woke his family, friends and neighbours, all of whom managed to flee the building.
“Thank God [he came down],” said Mrs Alves. “But he said to me even if I had told him to stay inside he would have come down.”
In contrast to last week, when residents audibly sighed and expressed in- dignation as Dany Cotton, the London Fire Brigade chief, said she “wouldn’t change anything we did on the night”, survivors watched in silence yesterday. In the morning, they heard Mr Roncolato recount calmly how he had waited nearly five hours for firefighters to rescue him, during which time he ate a bowl of porridge, kept his flat ventilated and phoned his boss to say he wouldn’t be able to come to work.
One of the last survivors to be rescued from the blaze, Mr Roncolato said he was sleeping when a phone call from Christopher, his son, at 1.40am had alerted him to the fire. He imposed a “stay-put” policy on himself after seeing that the 10th-floor corridor outside his flat had filled with thick, black smoke that could have suffocated him.
In a second call from his son and a fire officer, Mr Roncolato was told “someone will come and get [you]”. Even though his son told firefighters that he was in flat 72, Mr Roncolato was not rescued until 6am.
He said: “I also now know that numerous 999 calls were made about me throughout the night, but it was not until the final call, when Christopher handed his friend’s phone over to a fire marshal, that firefighters were sent to finally rescue me. I do not understand why this information was not communicated to the firefighters earlier, but I will be eternally grateful to the two firefighters who no doubt saved my life.”