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| London fire: 12 confirmed dead but police expect further fatalities after tower block blaze – latest updates | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| 9.09am BST | |
| 09:09 | |
| Ruptured gas main hampered efforts to control fire | |
| A ruptured gas main hampered efforts to quell the fire, according to London Fire Brigade. In its latest update it said: | |
| Firefighters worked with the gas authority to isolate a ruptured gas main in the block and once this work was completed they were able to extinguish the fire with the help of a 40 metre aerial appliance brought in to assist from Surrey Fire and Rescue Service. The fire was under control by 1.14am | |
| It also confirmed that search and rescue teams will be deployed today. | |
| Firefighters will be at the scene throughout today, with around 60 firefighters and eight fire engines and other specialist resources still in attendance. Our Urban Search and Rescue teams will also be working with local authority contractors to shore up the building to make it safe to continue with the next phase of the operation. | |
| Updated | |
| at 9.12am BST | |
| 9.02am BST | |
| 09:02 | |
| Alice Ross | |
| Under the Westway there’s a makeshift outdoor centre where volunteers have been inundated with piles of donations. | |
| At the gates, Imran Khan, who lives in White City, is making up flat-pack boxes and turning away people arriving with new donations. Here, the team desperately needs people to help sort the goods, volunteers say. | |
| “I brought loads of clothes and stuff and I ended up staying,” Khan said. “When I came there were two of them [volunteers] and look at this.” | |
| He waves towards bin bags full of clothes piled to above head height, household goods and hundreds of bags of food – tinned goods, boxes of crisp bags, palettes of water bottles and trolleys of fresh fruit. Khan returned this morning at 4am. | |
| Mohammed Khanji, another volunteer, said: “I’m a doctor, so I came to see if there was any medical help [needed]. They seemed to be well covered so I just came to see what else they would need.” He has been sorting donations since 6pm yesterday. “There’s a surplus of donations and it needs to be sorted first before people bring other things.” | |
| Volunteers worked through the night sorting vast quantities of donations #GrenfellTower pic.twitter.com/wbII6QzI0G | |
| Satta Badham, another volunteer from west London, usually runs a homeless charity. He said nobody was in charge of the sorting effort – it was entirely ad hoc. | |
| Once goods are sorted they are being driven to the centres around the area where people made homeless in the fire are being housed. | |
| “The amount of stuff that’s come here is enough for thousands of people. More than anything they need housing: where are they going to go?” he asked. In the medium and long term, it’s money people will need to get back on their feet, he said. “There’s only so much of this stuff we can keep bringing and moving,” he added. | |
| Like others, Badham is concerned about the lack of central coordination. “There should be a different system if something like this happens for people to be taken care of,” he said. “It’s the poorer people in the richest place. You’re in the richest council in the country and you’re telling me you can’t house 600 people?” | |
| Updated | |
| at 9.12am BST | |
| 8.52am BST | |
| 08:52 | |
| Tower too unsafe to search | |
| Fire commissioner Dany Cotton says the firefighters have done a “brief search” of all 24 floors of the tower but a thorough search is being delayed because of concerns about the safety of the building. | |
| Speaking to BBC News she said: “On the upper floors there is still some very small pockets of fire remaining. Due to the nature of the building at the moment we are not sending firefighters in there, because it is not structurally safe for them to go right out to the edges of the building now.” | |
| Here are the other key points from the interview | |
| Urban search and rescue teams will be deployed today | |
| Our plan for today, along with structural surveyors and the local authority, I have got my urban search and rescue team who are coming down to make an assessment of the building, to look at ways we can sure up the building to enable ourselves and the police to carry on the search in the building. | |
| It will be a very difficult and painstaking process to systematically. | |
| There are still a number of floors that will require a thorough search for us to make sure there are no further people involved in this fire. However we do anticipate that on some of upper floors there may still be people involved in there. | |
| Cotton paid tribute to the bravery of firefighters | |
| Early on in the fire my firefighters battled through intense heat to reach some of the very higher floors. We were specifically targeting flats where we were getting calls where we knew where people were. It was a very stressful and difficult time. I was committing hundreds of firefighters into a building that to lot of people looked terribly unsafe. My firefighters were desperate to get in the and desperate to rescue people. We committed crew after crew into a very dangerous, very hot and very difficult situation, because we had a passion to do as much as we could to rescue the people in there. It was a very traumatic event for everyone involved. | |
| Nine fire fighters were injured | |
| Up to nine of my firefighters suffered minor injuries, including burns and heat exhaustion. There was debris falling everywhere. | |
| Concern for mental health of firefighters | |
| I’m more concerned longer term about the mental impact on a lot of people who were here, people saw and heard things on scale they have never seen before. Going forward one of my main concerns about my firefighters is about their mental well being, and about doing trauma and care counselling for them. | |
| Number of missing is unknown | |
| We are unaware of how many people are in the building. There are some people who might have lived alone who we are not sure if they are in there or away. There are people who are reported missing who subsequently might have been in rest centres or hospitals. As soon as we can we will go into the building and do that painstaking finger tip search. | |
| Too early to speculate on the cause | |
| I have never seen a fire like this in my career. The fire did spread very quickly. It is far too early to speculate about the cause of that. There will be a thorough investigation. Here and now we are still in the rescue phase | |
| 8.12am BST | 8.12am BST |
| 08:12 | 08:12 |
| The chair of the London assembly housing committee has called for residents to be “much more involved in the management of their blocks”. | The chair of the London assembly housing committee has called for residents to be “much more involved in the management of their blocks”. |
| The Green Party’s Siân Berry told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that residents at Grenfell felt “alienated” from the property owners “in many, many ways”, and said they had raised “all kinds of issues, not just fire safety, and it seems like that relationship had broken down”. | The Green Party’s Siân Berry told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that residents at Grenfell felt “alienated” from the property owners “in many, many ways”, and said they had raised “all kinds of issues, not just fire safety, and it seems like that relationship had broken down”. |
| She added: “Who knows these buildings better than the people who live in them? And when they raise fire safety, when they raise life-threatening issues, they need to be listened to, and there just currently isn’t the structure for that to happen - that’s a structural issue, it’s not just about this block, it’s about residents across London. | She added: “Who knows these buildings better than the people who live in them? And when they raise fire safety, when they raise life-threatening issues, they need to be listened to, and there just currently isn’t the structure for that to happen - that’s a structural issue, it’s not just about this block, it’s about residents across London. |
| “There are many, many groups, like the Grenfell Action Group, who are getting involved in trying to make their homes better and they are treated with suspicion by the authorities – they are regarded as troublemakers as this group was – and I think we need to change that at a much bigger level.” | “There are many, many groups, like the Grenfell Action Group, who are getting involved in trying to make their homes better and they are treated with suspicion by the authorities – they are regarded as troublemakers as this group was – and I think we need to change that at a much bigger level.” |
| Updated | Updated |
| at 8.41am BST | at 8.41am BST |
| 8.04am BST | 8.04am BST |
| 08:04 | 08:04 |
| Alice Ross | Alice Ross |
| Even when the charred shell of Grenfell Tower is out of sight, there is still a lingering burned, chemical smell that’s detectable from Ladbroke Grove and beyond. | Even when the charred shell of Grenfell Tower is out of sight, there is still a lingering burned, chemical smell that’s detectable from Ladbroke Grove and beyond. |
| A thin cloud of smoke – or possibly dust and fine ash – is emerging from the side of the tower block closest to the Westway. | |
| Locals making their way to work through the Lancaster West estate have to navigate a warren of police cordons and make their way past television crews, and homemade signs directing those affected to emergency accommodation, offering free food or support with banking. | Locals making their way to work through the Lancaster West estate have to navigate a warren of police cordons and make their way past television crews, and homemade signs directing those affected to emergency accommodation, offering free food or support with banking. |
| Street sweepers are clearing away discarded water bottles and food containers from the thousands of donations, interspersed with chunks of black ash from the tower. | Street sweepers are clearing away discarded water bottles and food containers from the thousands of donations, interspersed with chunks of black ash from the tower. |
| Updated | Updated |
| at 9.14am BST | |
| 7.56am BST | 7.56am BST |
| 07:56 | 07:56 |
| Labour demands special Commons session | Labour demands special Commons session |
| Matthew Weaver | Matthew Weaver |
| Labour is demanding a special Commons session to quiz a senior minister about what the government plan to do in the wake of the fire and ask why it failed to act on coroners’ concerns about two previous tower block fires. | Labour is demanding a special Commons session to quiz a senior minister about what the government plan to do in the wake of the fire and ask why it failed to act on coroners’ concerns about two previous tower block fires. |
| Shadow housing minister John Healey said: “We are demanding now a minister comes to the House of Commons for a special statement session.” | Shadow housing minister John Healey said: “We are demanding now a minister comes to the House of Commons for a special statement session.” |
| Speaking to ITV’s Good Morning Britain he added: “Overnight we have asked the government: get a minister into parliament today, let parliament recognise how serious this tragedy is. It is the sort of thing that allows us to pay respect to the victims, but importantly it helps provide some of the answers that people are asking about what went off, what’s being done and most importantly what’s not being done to learn the lessons and act after the last tragedies that we saw now nearly eight years ago.” | Speaking to ITV’s Good Morning Britain he added: “Overnight we have asked the government: get a minister into parliament today, let parliament recognise how serious this tragedy is. It is the sort of thing that allows us to pay respect to the victims, but importantly it helps provide some of the answers that people are asking about what went off, what’s being done and most importantly what’s not being done to learn the lessons and act after the last tragedies that we saw now nearly eight years ago.” |
| Healey also called for an immediate fire safety review of tower blocks. He said: “What it really needs now is for a very senior cabinet minister to show they are getting a grip of this and reassuring tenants in other tower blocks that they will get to the bottom of the problems. They should commission an independent immediate review so that the clear lessons must now be taken seriously.” | Healey also called for an immediate fire safety review of tower blocks. He said: “What it really needs now is for a very senior cabinet minister to show they are getting a grip of this and reassuring tenants in other tower blocks that they will get to the bottom of the problems. They should commission an independent immediate review so that the clear lessons must now be taken seriously.” |
| Healey said the work of government should not be delayed by government negotiations with the DUP on securing a working majority. “One of our problems is our parliament is paralysed by the paralysis is Downing Street, because nothing can be down in parliament till after the Queen’s speech and we still don’t have a debate,” he said. | Healey said the work of government should not be delayed by government negotiations with the DUP on securing a working majority. “One of our problems is our parliament is paralysed by the paralysis is Downing Street, because nothing can be down in parliament till after the Queen’s speech and we still don’t have a debate,” he said. |
| He accused ministers of rejecting or ignoring key recommendations of coroners’ reports into tower block fires in south London and Southampton. He said: | He accused ministers of rejecting or ignoring key recommendations of coroners’ reports into tower block fires in south London and Southampton. He said: |
| The coroner after that [2009] Lakanal fire in 2013 and the coroner who did the same sort of inquiry into a fire in a tower block in Southampton reporting at the same time, did a rule 33 letter. This is where coroners take the unusual step of recommending to government things that can be done to prevent future fire deaths. Two of the recommendations were simply rejected: that’s information on site about complex blocks like this for firefighters and also encouraging the wider use of sprinkler systems in similar high rise blocks. The final important recommendation about reviewing the building regulations should be reviewed. That was four years ago and that has simply been neglected. So there are some serious questions to answer now ... | The coroner after that [2009] Lakanal fire in 2013 and the coroner who did the same sort of inquiry into a fire in a tower block in Southampton reporting at the same time, did a rule 33 letter. This is where coroners take the unusual step of recommending to government things that can be done to prevent future fire deaths. Two of the recommendations were simply rejected: that’s information on site about complex blocks like this for firefighters and also encouraging the wider use of sprinkler systems in similar high rise blocks. The final important recommendation about reviewing the building regulations should be reviewed. That was four years ago and that has simply been neglected. So there are some serious questions to answer now ... |
| The recommendation to encourage the wider use of sprinklers in such blocks was rejected by the housing minister in front of a select committee. The important recommendation to review the building regulations specifically looking at questions of cladding and potentially compromising the fire safety of the building itself, drawn attention by the coroners at that time, is simply being put to one side. So there are some very serious questions for ministers to answer now, that residents are asking at Grenfell Tower, and very important reassurance to give to many many people who live in similar tower blocks throughout the country. | The recommendation to encourage the wider use of sprinklers in such blocks was rejected by the housing minister in front of a select committee. The important recommendation to review the building regulations specifically looking at questions of cladding and potentially compromising the fire safety of the building itself, drawn attention by the coroners at that time, is simply being put to one side. So there are some very serious questions for ministers to answer now, that residents are asking at Grenfell Tower, and very important reassurance to give to many many people who live in similar tower blocks throughout the country. |
| Four years on from two coroners’ reports we are still waiting for even a plan to review building regulations that government said they would. | Four years on from two coroners’ reports we are still waiting for even a plan to review building regulations that government said they would. |
| Updated | Updated |
| at 8.16am BST | at 8.16am BST |
| 7.16am BST | 7.16am BST |
| 07:16 | 07:16 |
| No sign of the fire still burning in Grenfell Tower, but you can see the aerial platform being used by firecrews inspecting the damage @LBC pic.twitter.com/deO26Dkl7S | No sign of the fire still burning in Grenfell Tower, but you can see the aerial platform being used by firecrews inspecting the damage @LBC pic.twitter.com/deO26Dkl7S |
| 7.13am BST | 7.13am BST |
| 07:13 | 07:13 |
| Summary | Summary |
| Hello, if you have just joined us, here is an update. | Hello, if you have just joined us, here is an update. |
| At least 12 people have died after a huge fire engulfed a tower block in west London at about 1am on Wednesday. Police have said the death toll is likely to rise. | At least 12 people have died after a huge fire engulfed a tower block in west London at about 1am on Wednesday. Police have said the death toll is likely to rise. |
| A huge relief effort has swung into action, with charity workers and volunteers providing aid for those affected. Residents have voiced their anger at a lack of coordination from the council or other authorities. More than £1m to help displaced residents has been raised via online donations in just over 24 hours. | A huge relief effort has swung into action, with charity workers and volunteers providing aid for those affected. Residents have voiced their anger at a lack of coordination from the council or other authorities. More than £1m to help displaced residents has been raised via online donations in just over 24 hours. |
| NHS England said 34 people remain in hospital, including 18 who are in critical care. Initially, 74 patients were treated in six hospitals across London. | NHS England said 34 people remain in hospital, including 18 who are in critical care. Initially, 74 patients were treated in six hospitals across London. |
| Pockets of fire were still burning in the 24-storey block on Wednesday evening and firefighters remained on the scene overnight. | Pockets of fire were still burning in the 24-storey block on Wednesday evening and firefighters remained on the scene overnight. |
| Worried family and friends appealed via social media for help to find the missing. Several hundred people would have been asleep in the block when the fire took hold. | Worried family and friends appealed via social media for help to find the missing. Several hundred people would have been asleep in the block when the fire took hold. |
| Experts said the fire spread at unusual speed and raised concerns whether the cladding may have contributed to this. The tower, which was built in 1974, recently underwent a major refurbishment. | Experts said the fire spread at unusual speed and raised concerns whether the cladding may have contributed to this. The tower, which was built in 1974, recently underwent a major refurbishment. |
| It emerged the cladding used in Grenfell Tower was behind a rapidly spreading blaze at a tower block in Melbourne in 2014. An eighth-floor fire raced up 13 floors to the roof of the 21-storey building in 11 minutes. The spread was “directly associated” with the external cladding, said the fire brigade. | It emerged the cladding used in Grenfell Tower was behind a rapidly spreading blaze at a tower block in Melbourne in 2014. An eighth-floor fire raced up 13 floors to the roof of the 21-storey building in 11 minutes. The spread was “directly associated” with the external cladding, said the fire brigade. |
| The Grenfell Action Group, a residents’ association, repeatedly warned about the risk of fire and claimed a major blaze was narrowly averted after a power surge in 2013. The group said its concerns were dismissed. | The Grenfell Action Group, a residents’ association, repeatedly warned about the risk of fire and claimed a major blaze was narrowly averted after a power surge in 2013. The group said its concerns were dismissed. |
| The Circle and Hammersmith and City Tube lines between Hammersmith and Edgware Road have now reopened, as has the A40 Westway. However, there are bus diversions still in place. Check here for the latest transport updates. | The Circle and Hammersmith and City Tube lines between Hammersmith and Edgware Road have now reopened, as has the A40 Westway. However, there are bus diversions still in place. Check here for the latest transport updates. |
| Witnesses described screams of terror and people jumping in an attempt to reach safety. | Witnesses described screams of terror and people jumping in an attempt to reach safety. |
| A baby was caught by a member of the public after being dropped from the ninth or 10th floor, a witness said. | A baby was caught by a member of the public after being dropped from the ninth or 10th floor, a witness said. |
| More than 200 firefighters tackled the blaze at its peak with more than 40 engines. Sixty-five people were rescued. | More than 200 firefighters tackled the blaze at its peak with more than 40 engines. Sixty-five people were rescued. |
| 6.50am BST | 6.50am BST |
| 06:50 | 06:50 |
| More than £1m has been raised in just over 24 hours for people affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower, Press Association reports. | More than £1m has been raised in just over 24 hours for people affected by the fire at Grenfell Tower, Press Association reports. |
| An appeal on JustGiving launched by Karolina Hanusova raised £286,437 while another set up by Haley Yearwood has generated £431,910. The Evening Standard launched an appeal on a dedicated website, dispossessedfund.org.uk, raising £282,939 as of 6am. | An appeal on JustGiving launched by Karolina Hanusova raised £286,437 while another set up by Haley Yearwood has generated £431,910. The Evening Standard launched an appeal on a dedicated website, dispossessedfund.org.uk, raising £282,939 as of 6am. |
| In addition to PA’s tally, there is a council fund, the Grenfell Tower Appeal, which has raised £198, 571. | In addition to PA’s tally, there is a council fund, the Grenfell Tower Appeal, which has raised £198, 571. |
| 6.28am BST | 6.28am BST |
| 06:28 | 06:28 |