There are fears the death toll in the London apartment tower fire could be "more than 100". Photo / Getty Images
There are fears the death toll in the London apartment tower fire could be "more than 100". Photo / Getty Images
There are fears the death toll in the London apartment tower fire could be "more than 100", as eerie photographs emerge providing the first look inside the building's smouldering remains.
Seventeen people have been confirmed dead after the fire ripped through the 24-storey apartment building in west London in theearly hours of Wednesday, but the number of fatalities is expected to rise.
A London Council source has told the Huffington Post that "emergency services are expecting the number of deaths to be more than 100".
Metropolitan Police commander Stuart Cundy told reporters on Thursday that some victims may never be identified.
"I'd like to hope that it isn't going to be triple figures," he said of the death toll.
London fire commissioner Dany Cotton said it would be a "miracle" if anyone else was found alive.
Meanwhile, new pictures show that some parts of Grenfell Tower are still being licked by flames, days after the blaze erupted.
Firefighters search for survivors inside the tower. Photo: Declan Wilkes/@Dodecahedron /Twitter
Five images show the smouldering remains of a kitchen, with a battered fridge and charred oven surrounded by a blackened washing machine, melted chairs, crumbling walls and a dripping ceiling.
A fire still burns in the corner of the room and the windows are completely blown out.
Another photograph shows a brigade of firefighters in a hall surveying the damage.
Seventeen people died in the fire, which ripped through the 24-storey apartment building in west London in the early hours of Wednesday, but the number of fatalities is expected to rise.
Metropolitan Police commander Stuart Cundy told reporters that some victims may never be identified.
"I'd like to hope that it isn't going to be triple figures," he said of the death toll.
London fire commissioner Dany Cotton said it would be a "miracle" if anyone else was found alive.
The charred remains of a kitchen inside the London apartment tower. Photo: Declan Wilkes/@Dodecahedron /Twitter
A video has also been published by the Sun that reveals the devastation of the blaze, depicting flooded floors, piles of charred debris and even a wrapped dead body.
The video, which appears to have been shot from a building next to the apartment tower, shows a web of firemen's hoses across the floor and water spilling down a stairwell.
Sooty handprints can be seen on the walls where it is presumed that residents tried to escape.
Water drips from the ceiling of the gutted apartment. Photo: Declan Wilkes/@Dodecahedron /Twitter
At one point the camera pans up to reveal the tower still coughing up black smoke.
Firefighters combed the sooty ruins of the 120-apartment tower on Thursday in a desperate search for scores of missing residents, however some parts of the building were too structurally unsafe to enter.
British Prime Minister Theresa May, who visited the scene on Thursday, has ordered a public inquiry to determine what caused the fire.
A gutted kitchen. Photo: Declan Wilkes/@Dodecahedron /Twitter
"We need to know what happened," she said.
"We need to know an explanation. We owe that to the families, to the people who have lost loved ones and the homes in which they lived."
