Kids tossed from London tower to escape blaze

Desperately trying to avoid the flames, residents stuck in a burning London apartment tower threw one baby and other small children from high windows to people down on the sidewalk, witnesses said. The inferno lit up the night sky and spewed black smoke from the windows of the 24-story Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, where more than 200 firefighters battled the blaze. 

The smoke stretched for kilometers across the sky after dawn, revealing the blackened, flame-licked wreckage of the building, which was still burning over 12 hours later. The fast-moving fire killed at least 12 people and injured 74 others, police said.

People trapped by the advancing flames and thick smoke banged on windows and screamed for help, witnesses and survivors said.

Samira Lamrani, a witness, said one woman dropped a baby from a window on the ninth or 10th floor to people on the sidewalk.

“People were starting to appear at the windows, frantically banging and screaming” and one woman indicated she was going to drop the baby, Lamrani told Britain’s Press Association news agency. “A gentleman ran forward and managed to grab the baby.”

Joe Walsh, 58, said he saw someone throw two children out of a window from the fifth or sixth floor. Tiago Etienne, 17, said he spotted about three children between the ages of four and eight being dropped from an apartment around the 15th floor.

Tamara, one witness, told the BBC: “There’s people, like, throwing their kids out, ‘Just save my children, just save my children!’”

One resident said the fire alarm did not go off – bolstering the arguments of a community group, which only months ago had warned of a potential catastrophe at the subsidized housing block.

“The flames – I have never seen anything like it, it just reminded me of 9/11,” said Muna Ali, 45. “The fire started on the upper floors ... oh my goodness, it spread so quickly. It had completely spread within half an hour.”

“This is an unprecedented incident,” Fire Commissioner Dany Cotton said. “In my 29 years of being a firefighter, I have never, ever seen anything of this scale.”