A bride-to-be is “devastated” after her wedding dress was lost along with the rest of her belongings in a fire that tore through a tower block in Dagenham.
More than 80 people were evacuated after fire engulfed the building in Freshwater Road on Monday, which had “known” safety issues. A further 20 people were rescued by firefighters.
Residents Lukasz and Agnieszka say they have “lost everything” in the fire.
The couple are due to marry in a fortnight but Agnieszka’s £2,500 wedding dress, which they picked up just two days before the fire, is among belongings destroyed in the blaze.
“At the moment we are homeless, we have nothing,” Lukasz told the BBC.
“We don’t know what to say. It’s hard to say anything in our situation. Basically we’ve got nothing left.
“We’re devastated because that [our wedding] was supposed to be our best day of our lives, but everything has just got burnt down in the building.”
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The couple are being housed for two nights in a hotel but “don’t know” where they will go next and have “no money” having taken out loans to pay for their wedding, the BBC reported.
“I should be flying on the Saturday to Poland to make organisations about my wedding. I don’t have documents, nothing,” Agnieszka added.
The building was undergoing “remedial” work to remove and replace “non-compliant cladding” on the fifth and sixth floors containing flats, according to a planning application document.
Around 225 firefighters took more than eight hours bringing the blaze under control. Two people were taken to hospital.
Other residents have recounted the terrifying ordeal they went through as they escaped the building on Monday.
Sam Ogbeide, who lives on the fourth floor, told reporters: “I opened my main door, smoke was coming in from the window – I live at the back. I saw it (the fire). Very terrible, very terrible.
Mr Ogbeide said it was very busy in the building’s stairwell with fellow residents who “didn’t bring anything” when evacuating, with some still “naked”.
He said: “I’ve never experienced something like this in my life. Everything is gone. I don’t know what to do.”
Their comments came as the Deputy Prime Minister visited the site of the fire on Tuesday, when she said progress on making buildings safe has been too slow and there remains “far too much” dangerous cladding on properties.
Angela Rayner, who is also Housing Secretary, said residents and firefighters had faced a “fireball” as the overnight bank holiday blaze broke out – more than seven years on from the Grenfell Tower fire and just a week before that inquiry’s final report is published.
Ms Rayner met residents in the area on Tuesday, and spoke of how “horrifying” it must have been for them to wake up to smoke and flames in the early hours, adding it was “incredible” that nobody had been killed.
Grenfell United, which represents many of the bereaved and survivors of that 2017 fire, said the incident in Dagenham “highlights the painfully slow progress of remediation across the country, and a lack of urgency for building safety as a whole”.
The group added that, seven years on, “the fact that when a fire happens the best we can hope for at the moment is ‘a near miss’ speaks volumes of the progress made since”.
Cladding on the seven-storey Dagenham building had been in the process of being removed, with scaffolding visible at the site and London Fire Brigade confirming there were “known fire safety issues”.
London fire commissioner Andy Roe said there are some 1,300 buildings across London which need remediation work done “as a priority”, a figure he said gives an idea of the scale of the challenge the fire service is facing to hold building owners to account.
Dame Judith Hackitt, who led a Government review on building safety after the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, said it is “really concerning” that so many people are still living in uncertainty and fear about their homes and that it was “very lucky” nobody died in Monday’s blaze.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s really concerning to me that so many people are left with this level of uncertainty and fear about the safety of the buildings they’re in.
“I mean, we can all take great comfort, I think, from the fact that no-one lost their lives yesterday.
“But, nonetheless, it’s a tragedy that those people have lost everything. They’ve lost all their belongings and everything else, and it could happen to other people.
“So this is a really urgent problem that needs fixing.”
Dame Judith criticised those who have been “passing the buck” on the issue of fixing buildings seven years on from the Grenfell fire.
She told Today: “The problem of who pays and whether it was Government’s job to fix was resolved, and Government has put up billions to fix the buildings that are rented to people, but in the leasehold case, that also has been fixed now.
“So this is really about people passing the buck, passing it up the chain, a lack of ownership, and actually pinning people down to do the right thing that they know they need to do.”
Dame Judith said the onus is now on Labour to ensure those responsible for remediation are held to account.
Government figures at the end of July showed that of the 4,630 residential buildings in England of 11m (36ft) or higher that had been identified with unsafe cladding, only around half (2,299) were noted as having either started or completed remediation works.
Of these, less than a third (1,350) overall were recorded as having completed such works.
Cabinet Office minister Ellie Reeves earlier said around 88 per cent of remedial works have been completed in tower blocks with Grenfell-style cladding.
