Huge Challenge For Fire Fighters Struggling To Rescue People From London Grenfell Towers

Grenfell Tower 

                            A huge fire has raged through the night at a tower block in Latimer Road, west London, with eyewitnesses claiming people are trapped in their homes.

• Huge fire engulfs 24-storey Grenfell Tower
• Reports of people trapped
• 30 people taken to hospital so far
• Bedsheets used to make escape
• 'Significant number' remain unaccounted
• 'The whole building has gone' - witnesses describe horrific scenes
• Grenfell Tower blaze in pictures

Forty fire engines and over 200 firefighters and officers have been called to a tower block fire on the Lancaster West estate in north Kensington this morning. The brigade has received multiple calls. The fire is from the second floor to the top floor of the 27-floor building.

Grenfell Tower Before Fire Accident

Assistant Commissioner Dan Daly said: “Firefighters wearing breathing apparatus are working extremely hard in very difficult conditions to tackle this fire. This is a large and very serious incident and we have deployed numerous resources and specialist appliances.“

The apartment block was built in 1974.

London Ambulance said 30 people are receiving hospital treatment.The BBC's Andy Mooresaid the whole tower block had been alight and there were fears the building might

collapse.

This man spoke to Assed Baig, a journalist with Channel 4 News, about his escape from his home on the 17th floor of the Grenfell Tower with his 68-year-old aunt. We’ve not yet been able to independently verify his suggestion that the building had no central fire alarm, or that the cladding was especially flammable.

           “We saw the fire engines, so we were looking outside at what’s going on. There was no fire alarms anywhere, because we don’t have a kind of integrated fire system – it’s just everyone’s house for itself. I walked out into the common area to see if the lifts are moving, to see if people are in a hassle – nothing. But I could smell the smoke.

         

            “I went back inside the house, looked out the window. I started looking down the window – I had to really pull myself out to look down the window, from the 17th floor, and I see the fire blazing, and coming up really fast, because of the cladding – the cladding was really flammable, and it just caught up like a matchstick.”

Another person said that He told the BBC: “I grabbed an axe from the fire truck, it looked like there was a bit of confusion about what to do.

         

               “I ran around the building looking for a fire escape and couldn’t see any noticeable fire escapes around the building. A lot of debris falling down.

Water Sprinkling 

               “I eventually gained entry onto the second floor, and once I got to the corridor I realised there was so much smoke there.”He added that given the thickness of the smoke, he would be surprised if anyone could have left the building without assistance.

            

               “I watched one person falling out, I watched another woman holding her baby out the window ... hearing screams, I was yelling everyone to get down and they were saying, ‘We can’t leave our apartments, the smoke is too bad on the corridors’,” he said.

By 5am, he said, the building was almost entirely burned out and the fire was sending a huge plume of acrid black smoke into the sky.

               “It has gone very quiet now, we heard a lot of sirens and screaming in the early hours, but now the building is pretty much all consumed. I hope everyone is out and being treated.”He also told of seeing people using their mobile phone lights to get the attention of rescue crews.

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