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A senior firefighter said the Grenfell Tower must have been evacuated way earlier that what has been done on the day of the blaze, says the Guardian and the Telegraph on Tuesday.
Senior fire safety officer Daniel Egan, who was on scene on 14th of June 2017 when the fire killed 72 people including 6 Moroccan nationals, declared during the Grenfell Tower Inquiry hearing that residents should have left the building on 2 am, 47 minutes before the decion was made.
According to him, it was not the right decision to tell residents to «stay-put». The building was fiercely burning and flames spread quickly, forcing firefighters to order evacuation at 2.47 am.
«My first thoughts were that we needed to get everybody out. I could hear the roar of the fire. It was obvious … you could hear people screaming … it was just so obvious, sorry», he told the inquiry into the disaster on Tuesday.
Egan wanted to ignore the stay-put policy, which forced the victims to stay in their flats, but couldn’t. According to the Telegraph, the officer «had told three separate managers that the building needed to be evacuated immediately, but his requests fell on deaf ears». «I was doing what I felt right», Egan said justifying steps he took on the day of the tragedy.
The Moroccan family that abided the stay-put
«It looked like a film, people were shouting and screaming, they were panicking and wanting people to help», he told the audience in an emotional testimony.
Among the Moroccan victims that died in the tragic blaze, the Wahabi family was one of the residents who abided to the stay-put policy.
Reportedly, Abdul Aziz El Wahabi, 52, his wife Fouzia El Wahabi, 42, and their three children, Yasin 21, Nur Huda, 15, and Mehdi were trapped and killed in the fire after being told by firefighters to stay in their apartment, lock the door, wet the floor and wait for help.
In the same building, the Belkadi family lived a similar fate after firefighters found Leena, a Moroccan six-month-old toddler, in the arms of her mother Farah Hamdan, 31, in a stairwell between the 20th and 19th floor.
For the record, the hearing held on Tuesday is part of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry that was launched last June by British Prime Minister Theresa May. It aims to establish the facts of what happened at building and prevent a similar tragedy from happening again. The public inquiry started with seven days of commemorations to the 72 victims.
