A harrowing log of emergency calls, amateur video and shocked eyewitness accounts from the night of the blaze has been released to the public as part of the Grenfell Tower fire inquiry.
Some of the footage compiled by Professor Luke Bisby reveals people reacting with horror as the blaze races up the high-rise building and burning debris falls from it.
“I told you, I told you get out,” one man could be heard shouting in a further clip.
“Oh my god,” one woman cried as huge pieces of fiery debris rained down from the blazing tower. Another could be heard sobbing as it became apparent the fire was out of control.
After the video was shown, chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick said: “It is truly shocking, every time you see it, it strikes you in a very similar way, very strongly.”
The video was released as part of the first day of evidence hearings in the public inquiry, alongside five new reports detailing the source of the fire, the spread, the role the cladding of the building played in the blaze, and whether the building was in line with safety regulations.
The audio recording of the first 999 call reveals a tenant, Behailu Kebede, telling the operator: “Hello, hi there is a fire in flat 16 Grenfell Tower.”
“Sorry, a fire where?” the operator replies.
“Flat 16 Grenfell Tower, in the fridge,” Kebede replies.
He then tells the operator the postcode, and urges: “Come quick please”.
He repeats: “Quick, quick, quick, quick.”
The operator tells him: “They’re on their way,” and asks him to wait outside.
Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: “The fundamental question which lies at the heart of our work is how, in London in 2017, a domestic fire developed so quickly and so catastrophically that an entire high-rise block was engulfed, and how it was that 71 people lost their lives in a matter of hours, leaving family and friends in shock, grief and bewilderment.”
Millett said the Grenfell probe was the “largest public inquiry ever established” in terms of numbers of participants.
There are 533 individual core participants, of which 21 are children who have not been named. Some 29 organisations are core participants, including 19 commercial bodies, eight public bodies and two trade unions.
He said the inquiry must proceed quickly “in light of the obvious risk to public safety posed by exterior fires on residential tower blocks”.
In January another person died having not left hospital since the blaze on 14 June last year, bringing the death toll to 72.