emergency services asked trapped residents to give
8am: Fire brigade admit there have been some fatalities
8.30am: First indication that the fire was started by a faulty fridge
9.30am: Structural engineers attend the site and state it is currently considered safe
10.35am: Mayor of London Sadiq Khan gives a press conference promising to ‘ask questions’ about what happened in the fire.
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said questions will need to be answered over the safety of tower blocks in the capital as a result of the fire.
London Ambulance Service said 50 people have been rushed to five hospitals around the capital, while some residents are still stuck inside the block on the 11th floor, with firefighters desperately trying to reach them.
Those in the upper floors were seen flashing torches in a bid to call for help, tying bedding together to create makeshift ropes.
Panicked residents trapped high in the enormous tower were heard screaming for help as they leaned out of their windows and tied bed sheets together in an attempt to reach the ground.
Many of those evacuated said they were woken by screams, intense heat and the smell of burning plastic, thought to be white cladding that was installed on the building last year as part of a £10million refurbishment.
One woman said that residents faced ‘either jumping out the window with their children and risk breaking bones or staying where you were and dying’.
The fire is said to have spread from the second floor to the roof of the enormous 120-flat block in just 15 minutes, with 200 firefighters struggling to bring it under control.
Eyewitness Tamara told BBC News: ‘You could hear people screaming ‘help me, help me’.
‘There were people throwing their kids out [of windows], they were shouting ‘save my children’.
The fire brigade were telling people to stay where they were, they were telling people ‘we’ll come and get you’.’
Hanan Wahabi, 39, who lives on the ninth floor, said she was awoken at about 1am by smoke.
‘I could see there was ash coming through the window in the living room, which was partially open,’ she said, sitting with her husband and son, 16, and daughter, eight, outside a local community centre.
‘I looked out and I could see the fire travelling up the block.
It was literally by my window,’ she said. ‘I slammed the window shut and got out.’
After the family escaped, she called her brother, who lives on the 21st floor, to see if he was all right.
A woman with six children who was attempting to escape from the 21st floor of the London tower block fire this morning got to the bottom to discover two of them were missing, it has been claimed.
