'Living in limbo' How survivors were failed in the days after fire

Maryam Adam said her whole body shakes when she recalls the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire and its immediate aftermath.

- Emine Sinmaz

She was three months pregnant when she escaped the inferno and stood outside aghast, watching the flames rise up the 24-storey block in west London as her neighbours screamed for help.

In the hours and days that followed, she said she and the community were abandoned and left to fend for themselves. "They treated us really, really badly. The council and the government failed us," Adam, 48, said through tears.

"I didn't receive any help in the early days from my council." Adam, who had experienced miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, became resigned to sleeping on the floor of her temporary accommodation because the bed was too high for her to get into. She ended up staying at that hotel for five months, alternating between sleeping on a mattress on the floor and a sofa bed while anxious about her pregnancy.

A seven-year public inquiry culminated on Wednesday in a report that laid bare not only the systemic failings in the run-up to the 2017 fire, but also how the survivors were "comprehensively failed" in the immediate aftermath of the blaze.

It said the emergency response of the government and local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), was "muddled, slow, indecisive and piecemeal", with aspects demonstrating "a marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity".

In a 1,700-page report, the panel led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick detailed how survivors were abandoned, without information about where to go or what to do, in scenes that were compared to a "horror film" and "war zone". It said many residents walked in the early hours to community centres that had opened in the absence of support from the authorities.