A search and rescue operation was underway Monday morning after a major fire broke out in a mixed-use building in east London, the London Fire Brigade said in a statement. Fire officials said that at least 100 people were evacuated.
The cause of the fire is still unknown, the fire officials said, but 225 firefighters responded to the blaze in 40 fire trucks, and firefighters were called to the scene at 2:44 a.m. on Monday.
The London Ambulance Service wrote on X that it took two people to the hospital.
The building, which was both residential and commercial, “has a number of fire safety issues known to London Fire Brigade,” the officials said.
The building in Dagenham, an area in far east London, had external “non-compliant cladding,” a planning permission application from 2023 shows. It was covered in scaffolding; architects had applied to replace the cladding on the fifth and sixth floors.
To many, that description will recall the devastating 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower, an apartment building across the British capital in west London, which left 72 people dead in the country’s deadliest fire in more than a century.
The fire at Grenfell Tower spread rapidly because of flammable exterior cladding and insulation, which was illegal in many countries because of the fire danger it posed.
In 2017, an independent review found that British construction regulations were “not fit for purpose,” and had allowed dangerous latitude for cutting corners in a culture of “doing things cheaply.”
And a separate report in 2019, which was harshly critical of the brigade, found that some of the people in the Grenfell building would have survived if the firefighters and emergency operators had not told them to stay put.
The final inquiry into the Grenfell fire will be published next Wednesday.
This is a developing story.
