London Fire Results in 17 Deaths but “No More Survivors”

All seemed normal on a quiet, early Wednesday morning until a fire began to rage through a 24-story West London apartment building.  Starting on the fourth floor, the blaze began to spread quickly throughout the Grenfell Tower, rising at an alarming velocity.  June 14 marked the day that the Grenfell Tower fire took the lives of at least 17 people, injuring an additional 70.

The Grenfell Tower was built in 1974, housing at least 400 people in 120 apartments throughout 20 residential floors—evidently, the building was fairly dated.  It is reported that, “Firefighters responded within six minutes.  The blaze began on the fourth floor and spread to the top with a velocity and intensity that stunned the 250 firefighters who responded.  Pockets of fire were still blazing on Thursday morning, more than 24 hours after the fire broke out.”

            Many are eager to know how the fire spread so quickly.  As officials work to uncover such information, some suspect that the spread stemmed from the exterior aluminum cladding.  The New York Times writes, “Usually, high-rise buildings are designed to contain a fire in its unit of origin, and in contemporary buildings, alarm systems and sprinklers are the norm.  Grenfell Tower was recently fitted with exterior aluminum cladding.  Such cladding, which often consists of aluminum sheets sandwiched over some kind of insulation, has been seen as a factor in past blazes, including three major high-rise fires in Dubai.”

As British Prime Minister Theresa May has helped to ease the losses that many residents endured after the fire, she sought to make sure “this terrible tragedy is properly investigated.”  With possessions, valuables and countless lives lost, the grieving still remains high among citizens.  She notes, “We need to know what happened, we need to know an explanation.  We owe that to the families, to the people who have lost loved ones and the homes in which they lived.”

But, not everyone is satisfied with the following words from the Prime Minister.  Many are infuriated with this occurrence and are not ready to forgive just yet.  David Lammy, the London Labor Party Member of Parliament, demanded that arrests should be made in regards to the fire; he called the incident “corporate manslaughter.”  He adds, “We built buildings in the 70s, those 70s buildings, many of them should be demolished, they haven’t got easy fire escapes, they’ve got no sprinklers—it’s totally, totally unacceptable in Britain that this is allowed to happen and people lose their lives in this way and people should be held to account.”

As Prime Minister May faces pressing questions regarding her failure to act on calls for multiple installations of sprinkler systems, citizens of West London gather to pay respects to those who were lost.  While many measures will be taken to heal and recover, resurgence is inevitable.

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