Grenfell Inquiry day 54: tenants give evidence about housing association

Nadia said that Notting Hill should have fixed their front door, which was not self-closing, but didn’t.

She added: “Although most flat doors were changed during the refurbishment our door was not. It was a heavy wooden door and was not airtight. Before the fire we could sometimes smell other people’s cooking, but we couldn’t hear noise from other flats.

“To shut the door properly, you had to pull it very hard. When my father came home he would ask why the door would be open. Sometimes it would look like it was closed but not actually be closed. It would be possible to push it and open it.”

As well as criticising Notting Hill, Maria and Nadia described their experiences on the night of the fire.

Maria said in her witness statement that her mother first alerted her to the possibility that something was wrong at 12.45am.

When she saw the fire out of her window, Maria woke her sister to tell her about it, but Nadia assumed that the fire was not a serious issue and told Maria to go away.

Maria and her mother took the lift down from their flat on the 11^th floor and left the tower. From outside, however, they could see how quickly the fire was spreading, and so Maria went back inside the tower at 1.21am to try to warn Nadia and her father.

She reached firefighters on the third floor and gave them the key to her flat, telling them about her relatives.

Nadia, meanwhile, had woken up, looked out of her window and realised the extent of the fire. She woke her father, who had a heart problem and diabetes.

While they were considering what to do, she said, the fire came through the vent at the top of their kitchen window, before the heat smashed the kitchen window and set fire to the plastic around it.

Dr Barbara Lane’s report to the inquiry had previously identified the vents as a possible route for flame from the cladding into people’s flats, but Nadia’s eyewitness account is the first to pinpoint it as the specific route taken.

Flames quickly spread through the flat, and Nadia and her father left and ran into the lift, after knocking on their neighbours’ doors to warn them.

They joined six people in the lift and took it down to the 10^th floor, where it became stuck. The lights went out and it filled with smoke, but they were able to open the doors and run down the stairs in the dark.

When Nadia reached the bottom of the stairs she realised her father was not with her. She was rushed to hospital and only discovered her father had died two weeks later.

While the majority of the residents in Grenfell Tower were tenants of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with management services provided by Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, housing association Notting Hill owned three properties in the building.

It used these to provide temporary accommodation for families waiting for a permanent home. Maria and Nadia said they had been in temporary accommodation in the tower for 16 years.

Two other families in Notting Hill-owned homes died in the blaze.