While official advice told residents to “stay put,” many Grenfell survivors took matters into their own hands, banging on doors, alerting neighbours, and guiding people out of the building. Their actions saved lives.
Miguel Alves, 13th Floor
Miguel told his children to leave the building, then knocked on every door on his floor, despite worrying his neighbours might be annoyed to be woken.
“It was my duty to help my neighbours, because they are my family; the people that live on my floor is like my family.”
Shahid Ahmed, 18th Floor
Shahid decided to leave after his kitchen window exploded. Even as he fled down the single stairwell, firefighters told him to go back up.
“I remember saying to one of them: ‘There’s a fire upstairs,’ and they told me to go back up. They had masks on. I couldn’t see their faces.”
Extract from Emma’s blog about escaping the fire and how the tragedy changed her. Read the full story
‘It was 1am when I first heard the sirens and I assumed there must be a problem at the factories nearby. But as we looked out of our flat window, we saw flames reflected in the windows of the school next door. Because of large plastic sheeting covering our window, I couldn’t really see what was happening. We’d stayed in with a takeaway that evening and I’d wanted an early night, but Luke wasn’t tired so we ended up watching TV. If we’d been asleep when the fire broke out, things could have been very different.
I’ve always been a massive fan of the TV show London’s Burning, so for a fleeting moment I thought maybe they were secretly filming an episode and hadn’t informed residents. But then a couple of minutes later, I saw another two fire engines arriving. One took a wrong turn, then rapidly reversed up our road. I knew then this was real life. Then suddenly, Luke saw a window explode from a flat on the fourth floor and I knew we had to get out fast.’
