A survivor of the Grenfell Tower fire has described her panic as flames burst through the kitchen vent in her 11th-floor flat, shattered the window and filled the room with smoke in a blaze that killed her father.
Nadia Jafari told the public inquiry into the disaster that the whole window frame, which she complained had been badly fitted in the 2016 refurbishment, fell out leaving an aperture full of flames that set the curtains on fire.
The blaze, which started seven floors below just minutes earlier, forced Jafari, her sister, Maria, mother, Fatima, and father, Ali Yawar Jafari, 82, into the lobby to try to escape. The three women made it out, but lost Ali Yawar in the “terrifying” commotion. He was pulled from the building by firefighters but was pronounced dead at the scene.
Nadia Jafari told the inquiry: “The glass in the kitchen window smashed from the fire and the flames then covered the entire window area. The whole window in the kitchen broke in two. The vent completely collapsed. I saw the glass break and the fire come through as I was standing there.
“The plastic around the window was burning. Before, the windows had wooden frames or edges, and when they fitted the new windows they left the wood in there. They just covered it with white plastic.”
She said the windows had been a problem ever since they were fitted as part of a £10m refurbishment that included the installation of combustible plastic-filled cladding panels around the 24-storey tower. Wind and rain came through some of the windows because they did not fit properly and the front door should have been self-closing but was not, she said.
The fire-performance of the windows and the failure of fire doors have been identified by experts as among a litany of building safety failures at the tower, owned by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
Ali Yawar Jafari, an Afghan jeweller who moved into Grenfell in 2003, had a heart problem and diabetes. As he knocked on neighbours’ doors to raise the alarm, he was panicking, sweating and his hands were shaking, the inquiry heard.
There was no way he could make it down the stairs and only one of the lifts was working. When it arrived, there were about six people inside. It descended only one floor and then it got stuck, the lights went out and the lift car filled with smoke.
“People began to panic and kept pushing the buttons,” she said. “Eventually the doors opened. I tried to get out but it was difficult. I realised that there was someone behind me who was holding on to me … It was terrifying, and the smoke was horrible.
“The only thing that I heard my father say in the lift was to tell me I should cover my mouth with my scarf. The doors closed and the lift began going down again. Finally the door opened on the ground floor and everyone ran out. I ran out of the lift.”
CCTV captured her leaving the lift at 1.26am with black smoke billowing behind her. Her mother and sister were also out. But her father was not there.
“I was crying and shouting and calling for my father,” she said as the inquiry saw CCTV footage of her leaving the building with soot on her face.
She realised he must have got out on the 10th floor, which was full of smoke and completely dark. She wanted to go back up to find her father, but could not because she did not have a key fob to re-enter and a police officer would not let her back in.
Jafari criticised the authorities for withholding information about her father’s death. “The authorities said that they didn’t know where my father was, but they did know – they just didn’t tell us,” she said.
“I now know that there was a postmortem on 16 June, but they did not tell us that they had found him for about two weeks.”
Her evidence came as Munira Mahmud, who lived on the fifth floor with her family, became the 23rd bereaved person, survivor or resident to give evidence. Mahmud, 34, met the Duchess of Sussex last month at the launch of a Grenfell community recipe book, to which she contributed. She broke down in tears as she recalled her last conversation with a close friend, Raina Ibrahim, who died with her two children on the 23rd floor. Mahmud escaped and spoke to Ibrahim on the phone at around 3am with the tower completely ablaze.
“She was trying to stay calm on the phone, but I could tell she was petrified,” she said. “I think she knew she wasn’t going to make it out alive. She said to me: ‘Thank God you’re alive.’”
Ibrahim was coughing badly and Mahmud encouraged her to try to get out but she replied that the fire service had told her to stay put. Mahmud heard children in the background saying they wanted their daddy. He was away in Egypt.
“If the emergency services had not told her to stay in the flat, then I believe she would have tried going downstairs to leave the tower and perhaps she would have made it out alive,” Mahmud said.
Later she went to the Portobello Road rugby club where someone told her that Raina had posted a video on Facebook saying a prayer and accepting that she was going to die.
The inquiry continues.
