© Toby Melville / Reuters
Firefighters were battling to rescue people trapped inside a 24-storey tower block in west London this morning hours after a huge fire broke out and swept through apartments.

The fire at Grenfell Tower on Latimer Road near Notting Hill started shortly before 1am on Wednesday.

The London Ambulance Service said 30 people had been taken to five London hospitals. Two hundred fire fighters were at the scene along with 40 engines and at least 20 ambulance crews.

In a statement on Facebook, assistant commissioner Dan Daly said: "Firefighters wearing breathing apparatus are working extremely hard in very difficult conditions to tackle this fire. This is a large and very serious incident and we have deployed numerous resources and specialist appliances."

The statement said the fire reached from the second storey of the building to the top and the cause of the blaze was not yet known. The London ambulance service said it had sent 20 crews to the scene, including a hazardous area response team. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, said in a brief statement on Twitter that it was a "major incident".

A Guardian reporter on the scene said one man could be seen waving a blanketfrom the window and calling for help. People from neighbouring estates were huddled outside in their pyjamas near the flaming building, some shouting "put your head out the window" or telling the man to shout his flat numbers so they could guide the fire services to him.

Fire officers were spraying his window with water to try and douse the flames. "There was a woman with a child. I saw her waving maybe thirty minutes ago," said a man who asked not to be named. "She said I've got a child ... I saw them spraying her window."

Hadil Alamily told the Guardian that she saw "someone jump on fire from the top floor". She had seen the man flashing a light in an SOS pattern. "He was screaming help, help, help but no one helped. He dashed a mattress out of the window. He was literally on fire and jumped."

Just before 4am the Metropolitan police said people were being treated for a range of injuries and evacuations were continuing. Reports said police on the scene were urging people trapped inside the building to use place a wet cloth over their mouths and make their way out instead of waiting for fire crews.

Photographs and video from the scene showed huge flames engulfing most of the block, with lights on in many windows. The tower contains 120 homes. Nick Paget-Brown, the leader of Kensington & Chelsea council said it was home to "several hundred" residents but it was not known how many were inside at the time the blaze broke out because of Ramadan.


Witnesses described hearing shouts for help coming from people inside the tower and walls of the building creaking. Fabio Bebber tweeted from the scene that the fire had taken over most of the block. Residents in neighbouring streets were being evacuated and roads in the area, including the A40, were closed. There was no service between Hammersmith and Edgware Road on the Circle and Hammersmith and City lines. Celeste Thomas said there were hundreds of people outside the building with residents and families trying to find each other.

Residents of 30 nearby flats were told to evacuate because of debris falling from Grenfell Tower. One local resident and witness, Victoria Goldsmith, told Sky news: "The whole building seems to be engulfed now. It's spread all the way to the top.

"There was literally two people trapped at the top and they had mobile phones and they had the lights trying to flash them and signal people ... They couldn't get to them ... the fire kept going and the lights went out. "They are trying to get it under control. Its pretty horrendous."

George Clarke, the presenter of Amazing Spaces, lives nearby. He told Radio 5 Live: "I was in bed and heard 'beep, beep, beep' and thought, 'I'll get up and run downstairs as quickly as I could'. "I thought it might be a car alarm outside and saw the glow through the windows. "I'm getting covered in ash, that's how bad it is. I'm 100 metres away and I'm absolutely covered in ash.

It's so heartbreaking, I've seen someone flashing their torches at the top level and they obviously can't get out. "The guys are doing an incredible job to try and get people out that building, but it's truly awful."


Witness and local resident Tim Downie told the Guardian it seemed impossible that there would not be fatalities. "The sheer scale and the speed with which it spread, the closer you got, it seems like there must be casualties and fatalities."

By 5am he said the building was almost entirely burned out and the fire was sending a huge plume of acrid black smoke into the sky.

"It has gone very quiet now, we heard a lot of sirens and screaming in the early hours, but now the building is pretty much all consumed. I hope everyone is out and being treated." He also told of seeing people using their mobile phone lights to get the attention of rescue crews and pieces of debris falling from the building, including plastic cladding that "popped off" in the heat.

Jody Martin said he got to the scene as the first fire engine was arriving at Grenfell Tower. He told the BBC: "I grabbed an axe from the fire truck, it looked like there was a bit of confusion about what to do.

"I ran around the building looking for a fire escape and couldn't see any noticeable fire escapes around the building. A lot of debris falling down.


Comment: The Guardian reports: "In 2013, a year before the renovations began, the residents' association, Grenfell Action Group, published a 2012 fire risk assessment of the building, which found that fire extinguishers in the basement boiler room, lift motor room and ground floor electrical room were more than 12 months out of test date. Some had "condemned" written on them in large black writing and had not been tested since 2009.
...
A residents' group also raised concern about the single emergency exit to the building in 2016, warning that if that exits were to become blocked in a fire, people would be trapped inside."


"I eventually gained entry onto the second floor, and once I got to the corridor I realised there was so much smoke there."He added that given the thickness of the smoke, he would be surprised if anyone could have left the building without assistance. "I watched one person falling out, I watched another woman holding her baby out the window ... hearing screams, I was yelling everyone to get down and they were saying, 'We can't leave our apartments, the smoke is too bad on the corridors'," he said.

An acrid column of smoke could be seen rising from the building shortly before 7am. The charred structure still had pockets of flame rising from several storeys as the desperate effort to bring the blaze under control continued.

Schoolboy Omar Kalam, 11, was standing anxiously at the emergency service cordon with father Walid, 44."My brother has friends and they live in there," he said. "I'm not sure if they are all right yet."

The tower block was built in the 1970s as part of the Lancaster West Estate project.