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Daily Mail
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'I just remember stepping over so many bodies': Harrowing moment daughter and her desperate family battle to escape Grenfell blaze is relived in new Netflix documentary
A family who lived in Grenfell Tower have detailed the harrowing moment they battled to escape the deadly inferno in Netflix 's new documentary on the tragedy that shook London. Marcio Gomes, his wife Andreia and their two daughters, Luana and Megan had lived in flat 183 on the 21st floor of Grenfell in North Kensington for 10 years. Andreia was seven months pregnant with their son Logan when the fire broke out on June 14, 2017. The entire family managed to escape the burning 24-floor building, but later in hospital doctors were forced to let Andreia's unborn baby die in order to save her life. In the streaming giants documentary Grenfell: Uncovered, released today, Marcio, now 46, and his eldest daughter Luana detailed the family's desperate escape and the moment they were told Logan would never be born. Perhaps one of the most disturbing recollections of their struggle to get to safety came from Luana, who was just 12 at the time. Speaking about the frantic moments in the smoke-filled stairwell with tears streaming down her face, the clearly traumatised 20-year-old said: 'I just remember stepping on so many bodies.' As charting songs of the time played, glassy-eyed Luana was transported back to the days leading up to the fatal event which changed their lives forever. She remembered her excitement about going into year eight as summer time began. 'I would definitely say I was very bubbly, I was very happy. I always wanted to do good in my grades. I was a good, happy 12-year-old,' she said with a vacant look in her eyes. Luana and her father recalled going out for a family dinner that night before the chaos unfolded. After getting home at around 11.30pm - just 80 minutes before the fire broke out - Marcio played and few games on his X-Box and then headed off to bed as he had work the next day. But he and his family were woken up at 1.15am by a neighbour banging on the door to alert him of the flames which were ripping through the tower block - ultimately saving them from being burnt to death in their sleep. Luana, who sobbed throughout the entire documentary, said: 'Everything was in a rush. We covered ourselves with the blanket that my dad had put in the bathtub, and I grabbed my dog and we just dashed it for the stairwell.' Haunting recordings of Marcio on the phone to a 999 call handler are played, with the desperate father heard shouting: 'Right, lets go girls. Go, go, go. Go through, go down. Let's go now! Keep going.' Speaking to the camera, he described the 'horrific' conditions in the stairwell, which left him 'coughing and gagging a lot'. The family were woken up at 1.15am by a neighbour banging on the door to alert him of the flames which were ripping through the tower block 'I didn't have any idea where they [his family] were. My expectation was they're in front of me,' he said, as recordings of the call handlers telling him firefighters were on the way up to rescue them echoed in the background. However, Luana recalled hearing her father's voice behind her, encouraging her to 'keep going' as she felt the bodies of her neighbours beneath her feet. 'And then it got to a point where I couldn't hear my dad anymore behind me. He sounded like he was, like, far in front of me, like, down the stairwell,' she said. Marcio remembered the terrifying moment he heard Luana scream 'Dad!' and it dawned on him that his girls were in fact behind him further up the stairs. Weeping Luana said: 'I just remember saying "I can't do it anymore", like, I can't carry on. And I remember placing my dog down on the stairwell because I couldn't cope.' That was her last memory inside the burning building before 'everything went pitch black' and she collapsed. More heart-wrenching 999 recordings play of Marcio pleading to go and look for his family, to which the call handler replied: 'You need to go back upstairs and get your girls.' The panicked father can then be heard desperately shouting in between smog-induced coughs and tears: 'Hold the rails, keep coming Luana! Megan, Luana, come on. Come on come on...' It was then he realised his eldest child had passed out from the heavy fumes and smoke inhalation. When he looked between the rails of the stairwell, he could see a 'very faint light'. 'I kind of thought "God, that must be a firefighter". I quickly ran down, and I shouted, I said "My daughter's upstairs",' he said as 999 recordings run of him telling the handler: 'I need to go up and get her. I've got to get her out.' When he tried to go back up the stairs to save them, another firefighter grabbed him from behind and ordered him to keep going down so he could get out. His voice broke as he continued: 'I saw Luana being carried out, but I didn't know where my wife was, I didn't know where Megan was.' Safely outside the blazing building, Marcio found Helen Gebremeskel and her daughter Lulya, who lived on the same floor, and they handed him over to the police. Officers told the worried father they couldn't promise anything, but informed him they were aware his pregnant wife and youngest daughter were still in the building. But firefighters had actually already brought them both to safety, which Marcio somehow all of a sudden knew in his gut. The Grenfell Tower residential building is seen on fire and engulfed in plumed of black smoke on June 14, 2017 He explained how he sighed with relief before he even saw her, before turning around to see Andreia and 10-year-old Megan sitting by a tree. The heavily pregnant and distraught wife asked her husband where their other daughter was. 'Of course, I knew where Luana was,' he said, 'She was to our side. They were resuscitating her.' Thankfully, paramedics put the family in one ambulance all together to get Luana to hospital. 'Next thing I know, I woke up and I was in the ambulance and I was the only one on the bed,' said Luana of her first memory on the outside. Selflessly, all the 12-year-old could think about when she first woke up was her mother and unborn brother. 'I just kept thinking, "Why am I on this bed?", like, "I'm not the priority here. If anyone's the priority, it's my mum", because obviously she was pregnant at the time. And then I just fell back asleep again.' Yet, it wasn't until the family reached King's College Hospital that they realised their heartbreaking plight was far from over. Struggling to get his words out, Marcio recalled the minute doctors came and said they needed to speak to him. 'They said they were going to need to make a call between Andreia and the baby. 'They said "In these circumstances we take the mother's side", and I said "Yeah, I understand that's what you need to do".' He paused, bit his bottom lip and cast his eyes down: 'That's when they said Logan had passed away.' The grieving teary-eyed father added: '72 people died, 18 of them were children, including my son, who was the youngest victim. They were all robbed of whatever they could have become.'
Irish Times
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Grenfell Uncovered on Netflix: First-rate journalism highlights how working class victims were left waiting for answers
There are obvious parallels between the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London and the Stardust fire in Artane, Dublin , in that they were preventable calamities where the families of the dead were left waiting far too long for answers. There is also the fact that, in both cases, the victims were mainly working class. That element of the story is tackled head-on in Grenfell Uncovered, Olaide Sadiq's hard-hitting documentary about the 2017 London catastrophe, which claimed 72 lives. 'We were treated as if we didn't matter. We're working class, we're poor,' says one former resident of the west London tower block in comments that carry clear echoes of the official response to the Stardust blaze. Grenfell and its aftermath are told via eyewitness testimonies, including those of Luana Gomes, who was 12 at the time and had to be put into an induced coma after she and her family descended 21 flights of stairs in pitch-black smoke. 'We covered ourselves with the blankets my dad had put in the bathtub. I grabbed my dog. Dashed for the stairwell,' she says. The cause of the fire was the highly flammable cladding attached to the outside of the building in a penny-pinching makeover intended to address complaints that the tower had become an eyesore in affluent Kensington. One expert likens the covering to 'sticking a petrol tanker to the outside of the building'. Safer cladding would have cost extra – but not a lot, around £40 per renovated flat. [ Grenfell Tower, where 72 people died, 'to be demolished', families are told Opens in new window ] By the time of the fire, this cladding was already prohibited across much of Europe (although the situation in Ireland is not specified). But not in the UK, where Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron had led a campaign against state regulation of the private sector. 'The driving ideology was deregulation,' says one contributor. 'The state had no place telling private businesses what they should or shouldn't do.' READ MORE Cameron had been replaced by Theresa May by the time of Grenfell, and she was widely criticised for not visiting the tower block the morning after the fire. To her credit, she is the only prominent politician to appear in the Netflix film, and she accepts her share of culpability. 'One of the issues was the way in which authority had failed to listen to [the residents],' she says. 'I merely exacerbated that by not going to see them first off. It was important given the scale of the tragedy.' Were it possible, some politicians come off even worse than Cameron and May. There is Eric Pickles, now 'Lord Pickles' but, at the time, secretary of state at the Department for Communities and Local Government. At the official Grenfell inquiry, he urged officials not to waste his time – before confusing the death toll from Grenfell with that of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield. [ 'The fire broke our family': Grenfell was, above all else, a human tragedy Opens in new window ] 'Seventy-two residents died. 96 was the number of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster,' says housing journalist Peter Apps. 'That number should sit with everybody. If it's not important, you'll mix it up with another disaster where lots of working-class people died.' Grenfell Uncovered is important public service journalism, and it's a shame that the film couldn't resist a cheesy stunt at the end by appearing to imply that Luana's mother had died in the fire – only for it to be revealed at the end that she survives (though her unborn son did not). That one lapse aside, however, the film is first-rate long-form reporting. It makes you wonder, if Netflix were to apply the same journalistic rigour to Ireland, what might come wriggling out from under the rocks? Grenfell Uncovered runs on Netflix from Friday, June 20th
