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Austerity & Neglect Blamed as 79 Die in U.K. Apartment Fire Housing Immigrants & Low-Income Workers

Protests are continuing in London over last week’s devastating apartment fire that killed 79 people. On Wednesday, around 200 protesters, including survivors of the fire, marched from West London to the British Parliament to protest the government’s handling of the fire.

Last week’s fire occurred at a 24-story apartment building called Grenfell Tower, located in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of West London. Many of the residents of the building are low-income workers and recent immigrants. The company that recently renovated the building admitted over the weekend it used highly flammable—yet less expensive—cladding during construction. The cladding is banned from use in the U.S. and European Union, but allowed in Britain. The building’s residents say the renovation was largely aimed at making aesthetic improvements to the exterior of the building in order to make it blend in with the new luxury high-rises in the area.

Mustafa Almansur talking:

Now, what’s unfolded in Grenfell is a tragedy that wasn’t expected and nobody foresaw, of course. Everybody woke up to the shock and horror of what unfolded early morning on Wednesday, last Wednesday. And people, the general public, the residents in the neighborhood—everybody—rushed to do whatever they can do. The local fire services and the emergency services, they were on the scene rapidly to help rescue who they can rescue from this 24-story building.

It seems that the fire started on the third floor. And rapidly, within a matter of six minutes, half of the left side of the building was engulfed in fire. And within the hour, the entire building was incinerated, and the fire kept on until the following morning. Our fire services did what they can do with the very stretched resources and managed to get a certain number of people out. They were not able to reach beyond the 22nd floor, just because it became very—too difficult for them to do so, and the structure was not safe enough for them to go beyond that, either. We also saw that the local fire services, they managed to deploy whatever resources they had at their provision, but were unable to meet the needs and had to call in the support of fire services from neighboring boroughs and neighborhoods.

Now, this led to a lot of people that are still unaccounted for. It’s a 24-story building, and we believe there are in excess of 520 residents who were staying in that building. And so far we have a count of 79 people who have been declared as the victims who have died, in terms of fatalities from that incident. The remaining, we still don’t know about. And, of course, there is a number of—a small number of survivors who have been taken care of, are being taken care of and attended to both by the local council as well as the voluntary organizations who are on the ground.

When we woke up on Wednesday morning, and we were told that—by midday, we were told there was only six fatalities. And there was a sense of—you know, a sigh of relief that, OK, in this huge tragedy, 24-story building, all of it burnt down, and we’ve only lost six people. That’s actually quite a remarkable feat done by, you know, the fire services and our emergency services, in terms of evacuating people. And we felt a sense of relief. I felt a sense of relief, to be honest, although six lives are six lives, but it could have been far, far greater.

In that evening, I remember I had sent a message out to my family saying, “Hey, you know, it’s Iftar time. We are breaking fast, and let’s gather around. I’m making sushi.” And then I got a response back from my sister saying, “Do you not know what’s happened to Rania Ibrahim?” And I discovered that her close friend, Rania Ibrahim, who lives on the 23rd floor with her 5-year-old and her 3-year-old daughters, they were there, and she had messaged my sister on her cellphone saying, “Hey, I’m stuck here. I’ve been told not to get out of here. You know, pray for us. Is there anything you guys can do to help?” And she stayed put, because the police advice was to stay put. There was too much smoke and fumes in the building, and they were—their best advice they gave was to put wet towels underneath their doors to prevent the fire from going in, whilst the fire rescue services attempted to go in and rescue them.

words can’t describe how horrible it feels and the scale of this disaster and how much it has moved and hurt people in London and around the world. Rania was there crying for help. And not only that, we hear that many of her neighbors also came in and sought refuge in her apartment. And she let them in. We can hear in the video her neighbors coming in through the door and saying, “Close the door behind. Close the door behind,” because they’re trying to gather in apartments which they felt were safer. And, of course, nobody really made it out of Rania’s apartment.

there are no sprinklers in that building. And not only that, there are no fire-retardant doors in that building. And there’s only one fire exit. And that’s a set of stairs, one set of stairs, from the 24th floor all the way down. And not only that, the police advice to wet towels—we’re hearing people who have called their loved ones saying they cannot, because their water taps were empty. The water—because everybody was using the water taps in the building, on the 23rd floor, the 24th floor, the water pressure was so low, they were not getting any drops of water. So they couldn’t even do that.

– Members of the Grenfell Tower Residence Association had for years warned the building’s landlord, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, of potential safety hazards in and around the building. In a startlingly prescient blog post on the Grenfell Action Group’s website, members write, quote, “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the [Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation], and bring an end to the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation that they inflict upon their tenants and leaseholders.” And this is what Bloomberg reports, that Theresa May’s immigration minister Brandon Lewis, was formerly the housing minister. In that position, he declined to require developers to install sprinklers.

this isn’t new, in terms of an experience, to us. Lakanal House in Camberwell, south of London, in 2009, caught fire, and we had six fatalities there. The expert coroner who worked on that case, her recommendations was that sprinklers become mandatory, part of health and safety—fire safety regulations for high-rise buildings. Now, those recommendations were not enacted, and they were left as optional elements. Regulation-wise, it says fire—in our fire and safety regulations, that as long as they meet their overall requirements, they, the developers, are fine. And so that’s what we see in Grenfell Tower. It is not that the Grenfell Tower didn’t go through fire and safety checks. It did. There were 16 independent inspections of that building, led by the local council, which failed to spot the hazards and the problem areas that have been highlighted by the residents’ association for many years.

And now, even if the residents’ association, the public, the community see something as a problem, on the part of the contractors, they are—they will only do minimum, of course, to maximize their profit and lower their costs. So if they can get away with installing a cladding that was combustible, and a noncombustible, inflammable one would have cost them two pounds more, they would still cut that cost. We hear a number of 5,000 extra pounds would have been required to have the entire building’s cladding in a nonflammable material. Now, who is to blame? And then, who is responsible? The TMO would say, “Well, we gave it to Rydon, and Rydon, they followed all the requirements, and they met the regulatory requirements.” However, we see that the tenants had a different complaint, and it wasn’t listened to, purely because the TMO could get away with it. And the council didn’t have to listen to them.

The call for independent investigation—I mean, Theresa May had declared a public inquiry will be held. But the general public, there is such big mistrust between the public and the local authority and the central government. You know, since the event, for the first three days, four days, there was no presence. There was no visible presence of the local authority on the ground. The only people who were out there, opening up their doors, providing shelter, food, clothing, and gathering donations, were the general public.

And this is what’s led to my call for the protest on Friday, which was attended by over a thousand people. And people came because they realized that the local authorities, who have the resources in their hand, aren’t actually mobilizing any of the resources. They felt unheard. I tried to reach out to the local council, and they were too busy to answer the calls. So we went and protested outside the building. We had a set of demands that we sent in to the council leaders. And they came back after half an hour with a set of responses that were just woolly and fluffy.

the set of demands were that the council make a commitment to rehouse the victims of this tragedy within the borough. There is a concern, underlying concern, amongst the community there, that North Kensington, which is the north side of the borough, for which the council, local government is responsible for, and the south side, but particularly North Kensington, where Grenfell Tower is, it is an impoverished area. And there is an attempt—what is called social cleansing—to remove the impoverished families out of North Kensington into neighboring boroughs, where they can be moved to, because Kensington and Chelsea is the highest—the most expensive borough in London, where, you know, the apartments go from anything from 15 million to 200 million pounds each. And in the middle of that, we have a community, an impoverished community, who are living in social housing and are unable to pay full rents, and they’re living in subsidized accommodation. And they’re not being listened to. Also, we have a local council, which is dominated by a particular political party, whose—members of whom their socioeconomic class is not the same as that of the North—of the community in North Kensington. And now, if you look at South Kensington, which is the more affluent part of this neighborhood, we don’t have any of these issues. Funds are being invested in that area, not only for regeneration, but for local services, community organizations, etc., whereas this particular borough, Grenfell Tower and its neighborhood—neighboring areas, are suffering from gross negligence. So, the request was for the council to make an open commitment and say, “We will rehouse these people. We won’t move them out of the borough. We will keep them here.” And the borough failed to respond to that adequately. Their response was: “We will do our best to rehouse them as closely as possible.” And that wasn’t accepted by the protesters.

Secondly, there was a request for a commitment in terms of a package, a financial package, for the victims. How much will the council, and what will they do to compensate for the losses suffered by the residents of Grenfell Tower, because of the negligence of the council and their failure to take care of the concerns or pay any heed to the concerns that have been highlighted since 2014? And the council, again, failed to respond to that with a specific package. They said they will do their best, and they are mobilizing their funds. During that conversation, during that protest, central government—we had a response from our prime minister, Theresa May, who was being interviewed that very moment, and she knew of the protest. And she made a commitment, live on air, saying, “We commit 5 million pounds,” not knowing, of course, that actually the community had already raised in excess of 8 million, 9 million pounds by that time. So her coming out from central government and committing 5 million pounds was seen as a joke.

in fact, I was with the residents yesterday and community stakeholders in a meeting. And until now, they do not know where that 5 million pounds is, because it hasn’t yet filtered through to the people who need it.

– last year, the—72 of the Conservative, the Tory MPs, who are also landlords voted against a Labour amendment to ensure rented homes fit for human habitation.

there’s actually 128 Conservative MPs at the last count, which is 39 percent of the Parliament, who are landlords themselves. So here is really a fundamental failure in the democratic institution here, where the legislator has a conflict of interest with legislation. And so, when that motion was tabled, they quickly vetoed that and did not allow or did not push that through, if—which, if it had pushed through, then we would have seen sprinklers being installed. We would have seen nonflammable cladding and material being used in building constructions. However, we have a case of passing law through a body, through the Parliament, which has conflict of interest because they, themselves, are landlords. And in making a profit, it’s not in their interest to support such regulation. So, what do we do there is an open question.
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Mustafa Almansur
principal organizer of the Grenfell protests.

— source democracynow.org

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