UK’s May under pressure as toll in Grenfell Tower inferno rises to 79
Print Edition
THE death toll from a fire that ravaged a London tower block last week has risen to 79, police said yesterday, as the government tried to show it was improving its handling of a tragedy that has angered the public.
Fire broke out in the 24-story Grenfell Tower, a social housing block in Kensington, in western London, in the early hours of Wednesday, trapping residents inside as it tore through the building with terrifying speed.
“I believe there are 79 people that are either dead, or missing, and sadly I have to presume are dead,” Metropolitan Police Commander Stuart Cundy told reporters.
He said five of the dead had been formally identified, and it would be a slow and painstaking task to identify the others.
A minute’s silence was held across Britain at 10:00 GMT to honor the victims of the fire — a painfully familiar ritual after the country has been hit by three deadly attacks by militants in London and Manchester since March.
The attacks and the fire have come at a particularly difficult time for Prime Minister Theresa May, who was weakened by the loss of her parliamentary majority in a June 8 election and faces arduous talks on Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Cundy became visibly upset as he described conditions in the charred Grenfell Tower, where a search and recovery operation is expected to last weeks.
“I was in there myself and went all the way to the top floor and it is incredibly hard,” he said, before pausing as tears welled up in his eyes.
“It is incredibly hard to describe the devastation in some parts of the building,” he continued, his voice breaking.
“It is a truly awful reality that there may be some people that we may not be able to identify due to the intensity of the fire,” he said before pausing again to recover himself.
Emergency services have been widely praised for how they handled the fire, but the local community has accused the government of a slow and inadequate response. May has come under personal attack for failing to meet residents during her first visit to the site.
May’s spokeswoman told reporters that on a second visit to the area, during which May was booed and heckled, May had listened to the experiences of those on the ground.
“That’s why she totally accepted that it (the government response) hadn’t been good enough. She understood that immediate action needed to be taken to speed things up,” she said.
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