Mariana Chaudhary, 34, lives at New Providence Wharf in east London. Her flat is on the eighth floor, where the fire broke out, and she was confronted by thick black smoke when she opened her front door on Friday morning. Her neighbour’s flat was on fire, but the only thing that alerted her was her own smoke alarm.
“I shut the door and ran back to my balcony because the flat was filling with smoke,” she said. “My eyes were stinging.”
A firefighter in full breathing apparatus appeared at the door and handed Chaudhary and her flatmate breathing masks before telling her “we would have to crawl out behind her”.
In the panicked atmosphere the plan rapidly changed and the firefighter told them to stay put and they would come back. Chaudhary and her flatmate returned to the balcony and waited, worrying if they would ever escape.
“I was panicking,” she said. “I was wondering should I call my mum and dad. It was scary.”
Twenty minutes later firefighters returned, told them to hold on to them and they made an escape through thick smoke and scrambling over hose pipes running through the hallway.
“We were hugging them for dear life,” she said.
Chaudhary, who has already seen her £600,000 flat become unsellable because of the fire safety problems with the building, was told she should expect to spend at least two nights away from home in a hotel. It may well be longer.
“We are living in a firetrap,” she said. “Today, there were no sprinklers and no proper alarms. The fire spread so quickly upwards. The flats above are completely gutted.”
She said she believed that the fire started with a problem with the fuse box in a neighbour’s flat. In the last two years her service charge has risen 50% to over £6,000 a year, and she is angry about the lack of protection offered, including from the “waking watch” patrols recently started.
“The waking watch proved completely useless,” she said. “The whole point is to prevent and detect a fire before it gets out of control. They didn’t alert anyone.”
