‘The guilt still haunts me’: Grenfell survivor tells inquiry she wonders if she could have done more to save her neighbours

A woman who survived the Grenfell Tower blaze has said she is haunted by guilt over not being able to save more of her neighbours.

Maria De Fatima Alves – who lived on the 13th floor of the high-rise with her husband, Miguel, and their two children – told the inquiry into the blaze that residents trapped in the burning building were “shouting and screaming, waving mops and T-shirts” to attract attention.

Wednesday saw the beginning of a gruelling month of accounts from those who survived the blaze and were bereaved by it. Other members of the north Kensington community will also give evidence to the probe, which is sitting at Holborn Bars.

The inquiry also heard from 10th floor resident Antonio Roncolato on Wednesday about a litany of fire safety concerns that residents had raised with the authorities in the months before the blaze,

Ms Alves told the probe she and her husband left their home to drop off relatives who were staying at a hotel, at about 12.20am on the night of the fire on 14 June last year.

On their return to the building, they discovered smoke in the fourth floor hallway. Mr Alves decided he would go and get their children from their flat, while Ms Alves went to collect his phone, which he had accidentally left in their car.

When Ms Alves got outside, she was instructed by a firefighter to tell her family to stay inside the flat and close all the windows and doors.

But she failed to deliver the message because the building’s intercom did not seem to be working. Mr Alves and their children, Tiago and Ines, later managed to flee the building.

The family went to a friend’s house at nearby Bramley House, which overlooks the west side of the tower, watching the flames from the balcony.

“To see people screaming outside the windows and knowing we were in the same area but that we couldn’t do anything to save them was so traumatic,” Ms Alves said.

“I tried to focus on my prayers. I still think about what I could’ve done more. I often wonder if I had stayed at the tower and buzzed people to wake them up and get them out whether more lives could have been saved.

“This guilt haunts me.”

She described waiting for a miracle as she watched her bedroom be consumed by fire.

“The flames were coming from the east side. It was so upsetting to watch but I couldn’t take my eyes off it,” she said in her written statement.

“I had so many blessed things in the flat like blessed water, blessed olive oil and blessed candles. I thought there is no way they could go up in flames. They would stop the fire. I truly believed a miracle would happen.”

She went on: “I stayed on the balcony fixated on the flames. I kept trying to think of something I could do to help but there wasn’t anything. I felt guilty that we were all watching from our safe house while there were still people suffering in the tower.”

Ms Alves and her husband made a number of calls to residents who were in the building, urging them to leave.

She called her ‘adopted son’ Joao, telling him how he did not “need to panic” but to “come downstairs quickly”.

Her husband phoned his friend, Marcio Gomes, who said firefighters had told him to stay inside, she said.

“We could see the fire approaching their flat so Miguel was shouting down the phone saying ‘If you don’t leave now you are all going to die!’

“I was kneeling down on the balcony praying for the Gomes family.”

The inquiry previously heard how the Gomes’s made a desperate escape bid to escape the 21st floor where they lived.

Although they made it out alive, their baby son was stillborn soon after their escape.

At the end of questioning, the inquiry’s lead lawyer, Richard Millett QC, asked Ms Alves if there was anything she would like to add.

She said quietly: “People’s lives could have been saved if they were evacuated.”

Mr Roncolato, a 58-year-old former Grenfell Tower resident, earlier told the inquiry he was concerned about a number of fire safety risk in the period before the blaze.

After new windows were fitted during the refurbishment, which finished in 2016, Mr Roncolato “had an issue with a draught coming in through the windows even when they were closed”, he said in a written statement submitted to the probe.

There was a gap between the window ledge and the wall in his kitchen, which he contacted the contractor, Rydon, about, he said, but resorted to fixing it himself with plastic filler because “I couldn’t wait”.

Other residents had also complained draughts coming from the vents at the tops of the window, he said.

Mr Roncolato told the probe a concierge service had been in place at Grenfell Tower since 1991, he said, but it was scrapped during the 2016 refurbishment.

Residents petitioned the council landlord, the tenant management organisation (TMO), to reinstate the concierge, Mr Roncolato said.

“I believe it came to nothing because the fire came,” he added.

Residents were also unhappy about plans to move gas boilers into the building’s corridors as part of the refurbishment, since they were concerned they were a fire risk, he said.

They had meeting meetings with TMO about the issue, but representatives were “very resistant” to coming to them, according to Mr Roncolato.

Although the TMO finally allowed to reinstate the boilers in some flats, “for those residents who did not speak up, they were bullied into having the new boiler installed in the hallway by the front door”.

His 10th floor flat was fitted with a new front door about five to six years before the fire, he told the probe, which “was very heavy and difficult to open”.

“After I called the TMO to repair this, they removed the mechanism so it would stay open, unless you physically closed it,” he said.

After they did this, “It also felt a lot lighter,” he said. “I had no further issues with the front door after this time.”

Asked whether he had been given fire safety advice about these doors, he said: “No.”

It emerged following the inferno that the glazed, composite fire doors fitting in Grenfell Tower, which were designed to withstand flames for 30 minutes, failed after about 15 minutes during the blaze.

Mr Roncolato said in his written statement that he only became aware of the fire on the night of the blaze when he was woken by a phone call from his son.

He heard noise coming from outside that sounded like people screaming. “At first, I thought someone was having a party in the building opposite as this has happened before, but then I realised people were screaming ‘get out’ and I could hear sirens,” he said.

Smoke started to spew into the flat through gaps around the windows that smelled like burning rubbish and used wet towels to try to stem the flow, he told the inquiry.

He could see there was fire above him and noticed flames “crawling down the left side of Christopher’s bedroom window”, he said.

He tried to leave the building on multiple occasions, but was stopped by the thick black smoke outside his front door. “To me that was a killer,” he said.

Mr Roncolato called the night manager at the hotel where he worked to tell him he was trapped in his flat and would not be able to come to work.

The manager replied that he should “get the hell out of there”.

As he was waiting to be rescued, he said he “decided to eat the porridge that I had prepared for breakfast as I waited to be rescued”.

“This was to keep my energy levels up, so I would be ready when the time came to leave.

“I kept thinking if I remained calm and acted rationally that I would come out of this alive. I was constantly checking round the flat for any signs of fire or smoke.”

Mr Roncolato was one of the last people to be rescued from fire, emerging from the high-rise shortly after 6am.