Terrible fire last night at Grenfell Tower, Kessington, London.

Deaths have been recorded and about fifty people injured and in hospital following a rapid fire outbreak at Grenfell Tower in West London. The tower is a 24-storey building of 120 flats with approximately 600 people in it as at the time of the fire at 1.15am, Wednesday.

The fire was said to have began from a faulty refrigerator and spread up rapidly through the building in about 15 minutes. The death toll is expected to rise as children and elderly people residing in the upper floors are still missing. Residents were seen throwing themselves and their kids out of windows to avoid being burnt to death. Screams and cries were heard from the building as scared children and adults waved white towers and torches to get the attention of the 200 fire-fighters who started storming the building within six minutes of emergency call. It is said that fire alarms in the building failed to go off, the sprinklers failed and the only staircase out of the building was blocked.

Residents around the tower have been telling press of their gory experiences: 

Tamara, a resident said to BBC  'There were people just throwing their kids out saying “Save my children". Within another 15 minutes the whole thing was up in flames and there were still people at their windows shouting "Help me". You could see the fire going into their houses and engulfing the last room that they were in.’ 

Those who managed to flee said it was 'like hell on earth' inside and compared the disaster to the 9/11 attack - and also revealed there was no working fire alarm, sprinklers failed and the only staircase out was blocked."

Paul Littlejohn, 41, a Big Issue seller, lives in a smaller block immediately adjacent to the Grenfell Tower said: “There were people sliding down sheets tied together trying to get down from at least the ninth floor. There were windows being blown out, we saw fridges falling.”

Littlejohn, who has lived next to the block for two years, said he grabbed what he could and left the home around 2am with his friend, Justine Bell, who was staying with him, and his dog Rollo.

The pair loaded up Littlejohn’s television, clothing, food and water into a trolley they found and have been wandering the nearby streets since they left. “An officer woke us up,” he said. “He was very strict. He just said go now.”

Michael Paramasivan , 37, a builder, lives on the 7th floor of the tower and managed to escape the blaze. He lives with two others in the flat who fled with him. “I’ve lost absolutely everything,” he said. “The most chilling moment was when I suddenly realised it was a fire,” he said.

“Between 1 and 1.30 I was dozing in and out of sleep. I then smelt something. I got up and looked around to see if it was an electrical fault but there was nothing.“Then I looked through the spyhole. There was smoke and people running past. We just ran straight out down the stairs.”

Paramasivan said the material on the outside of the building went up in flames rapidly. “It just went up like that,” he said, gesturing wildly.“There’s no fire alarms in the corridors, no sprinklers, nothing. There’s only smoke detectors in the flat and they didn’t go off.”