Where is lakanal house

He said his religious faith had helped to keep him going: "I am really hoping that one day I'm going to see them.

This is what I keep saying to Helen each time I visit the cemetery. Finally, Mark Bailey described being in New York for work when he heard about the fire inside the building where he shared a flat with his girlfriend of six years, fashion designer Catherine Hickman, He described the wait for firefighters to recover his partner's body: "During that time, I was feeling indescribable. I was overwhelmed by grief and I would wake up every night screaming and crying.

I would think Cat was next to me and then realise what had happened and break down. The inquest also heard of the wider impact of the fire.

Helen Udoaka's father died of a heart attack the night he heard the news, the inquest was told. Among the firefighters who gave evidence was Christopher Rose, who discovered Michelle Udoaka's body. He broke down as he described finding the girl's body in a smoke-filled bathroom and how he had subsequently had to take seven months off work with post-traumatic stress. This article is more than 8 years old.

Deaths of six people in UK's worst tower block fire could have been prevented by proper fire safety checks, inquest concludes.

Lakanal House tower block in Camberwell, London. The jury said Southwark council, which owns the block, missed numerous opportunities to remedy botched renovation work which compromised fire-stopping between flats. Photograph: Rex Features. My partner and I were at home and saw it in the first five minutes.

But something changed and the fire began to move across, and up, with smaller fires breaking out further down. I could see the smoke was coming out of the flat above. Over the next two hours he watched as the fire engulfed flats in the 11th and 9th floors and fire teams started working up the block trying to rescue trapped families. From his own flat window, David, now 60 and retired from his work as a manager for National Rail, saw the blaze quickly spread, and joined the hundreds watching in disbelief at the hampered rescue efforts.

In the aftermath of the fire, hundreds of residents were sheltered in community halls, sleeping on the floor with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what had been donated by the charity efforts that sprang into gear.

After Lakanal, the council spent tens of millions on fire safety work including a rolling programme of assessments.

Firefighters had to mentally count the floors and they used up valuable air in their breathing apparatus as they climbed the stairs. This was the first time the majority of the people in the inquest, including the legal team for the families of the deceased, knew of this. Five days before the inquest started, the last remaining part of s20 of the London Building Acts Amendment Act was repealed.

Furthermore, the block breached the Building Regulations: tower block flats should be able to contain a fire for one hour so that the fire fighters can get to the blaze and put it out before it spreads. It is not intended that people will need to escape their homes, down the only staircase, while the fire-fighters struggle up with their hoses.

This fire was described in the Inquest as having moved very quickly and in unexpected ways. Within minutes it had spread both up and down to other floors. Compartmentalisation had been breached, the stay put policy was dangerously inappropriate. Alternatively it might be established that both are inadequate to the task of ensuring high rises are safe in a fire.

The dire consequence of this building regulation mess is that the cornerstone of the new fire safety regulatory regime introduced in , the Fire Risk Assessments FRAs — which are a legal requirement for every dwelling in England — are no longer fit for purpose. How can the government now stop this self-regulatory method of fire risk assessments falling into disrepute?

The law change that removed the fire brigades from regulating fire safety and pushed it on to landlords has failed. Two fatal infernos now make a review urgent. They said that the commonsense view on the ground for high-rise tenants is now to get out. This runs roughshod through firefighting and rescue policies in place for 60 years since the first high rises were built. This could of course now hamper firefighters, particularly when there is only one staircase as at Grenfell.

But the failure to impose strict compliance with the building regulations means that compartmentation — which confines fire to a single dwelling for up to 60 minutes — can no longer be guaranteed. The premise on which fire safety was ensured has literally gone up in smoke. The disruption caused by this would need to be explained to hundreds of thousands of high-rise residents.