Frustration grows at failure of authorities to say who survived, who perished and who is still missing, 17 days on

Grenfell Tower survivors are becoming increasingly frustrated at the authorities’ failure to release the full list of names of the dead, and have turned to independent experts to try to establish an accurate picture of the number of casualties and survivors of the fire.

In the absence of an official list, residents are relying on volunteer demographers and data experts to help them compile estimates of the death toll, filling names into online floorplans and spreadsheets, with data colour-coded according to who is confirmed dead, presumed dead, still unaccounted for or survived.

The shortage of official information, 17 days after the fire, has become one of the most sensitive and controversial issues for residents, who cannot understand why the police have not released a full list of the names of the 80 people presumed dead, or why they have not released the provisional names and numbers of survivors.

A retired local government demographer from Devon has been working remotely for the past two weeks with a Grenfell tower resident and computer expert to prepare a forensic crowd-sourced list.

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Michelle vonAhn, who used to work as Newham council’s senior demographic adviser, has been collaborating with a team of online volunteer investigators. They have allocated names to flats on different floors of the building and are listing 197 survivors, 52 people presumed dead, 24 confirmed dead, two missing. They believe there are a further 27 people unaccounted for – neither reported missing nor safe – raising the probable death toll to 103, vonAhn said, a figure she describes a “conservative estimate”.

The group has analysed the council tax register, electoral register, online telephone books and publicly available Kensington and Chelsea documents about the tower block, cross-checking information with residents’ testimonies and news reports.



“A crowd-sourced collection of data about Grenfell Tower occupants was done in response to the complete lack of information from authorities about the number of people in the fire,” vonAhn said.

She volunteered her expertise because she was felt it was “outrageous that the scale of this is being downplayed by the trickle of information. So many people are asking for these numbers. I know it is possible for the council to come up with the ballpark figure that they are looking for.” .

Volunteers have put names to most of the 41 one-bedroom, 82 two-bedroom, one three-bedroom and three four-bedroom flats but question why the council has not made public its own list of residents, built up from housing benefit and child benefit data, and information from local schools and GPs’ surgeries.



“I wanted to make sure that these people aren’t hidden, so that nobody notices. I wanted them to be visible,” vonAhn said. Even at a distance she has found the work traumatising, and she is having trouble sleeping because her “mind is so full of the fire and the people”.

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Volunteers are not suggesting that their efforts are more comprehensive or accurate than work being done by the police, they are just more willing to share information and work openly with survivors, collating and disseminating data in real time, in a way that police and local government officials are unable to do.

The absence of data has compounded the growing mistrust of authorities felt by residents. Khatija Sacranie, a volunteer lawyer working with the newly created Grenfell Legal Support group, said victims were constantly asking her about the absence of numbers.

“Everybody believes that they should be able to clarify how many people were in the building. We want a list of people who are missing, presumed dead. People don’t understand why that information hasn’t been put out. That absence of information is tantamount to disrespect of the dead. People feel that there is no official acknowledgement of the fact that these people were the victims of a crime,” she said.

Sajad Jamalvatan, a third-floor resident who has listed 150 survivors on a Whatsapp document, and who has also been attempting to compile an independent list of victims, has found the task so traumatising and exhausting, that he has temporarily halted his research.

“I’ve been asking people what happened to your neighbour? What happened to the people on the floor above and below? What happened to your family and friends? I am hearing from more and more people every day,” Jamalvatan, a second-year biomedical engineering student said, adding that he has not been able to update the database on his laptop for the past two days because he finds the work so painful. His estimate is of a death toll around 120, higher than the police figure. “Everyone has trust issues in Grenfell Tower. The authorities have lost my trust. People here are scared of the media, the council, the government.”

His initial determination was prompted by witnessing the disaster and waiting at the foot of the tower to see if a friend from the 21st floor would manage to make it out.

“He didn’t ever come down. It was very difficult. We saw exploding windows. Explosion after explosion. I saw a woman falling. Maybe others. I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing. Neighbours were shouting: ‘Don’t jump.’”

Other online groups are attempting similar exercises , and survivors gathering in the Portobello Trust rugby club have written a paper list, which is stuck to the wall.

Salah Duale, a taxi driver who escaped from the fire with his wife and two children, is also sceptical about the figures released. “We saw how many people were in the building. The number who died has to be more.”

But DCS Fiona McCormack said there are unprecedented challenges facing staff in the search and recovery operation which is expected to take until the end of the year, and stressed that she does not want there to be “any hidden victims” of the tragedy.



In a detailed briefing on Thursday, she said that the list of tenants provided on the first day of the investigation by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which runs social housing for the borough, was quickly found to be inaccurate.



Police have subsequently spoken to at least one occupant of 106 of the 129 flats, she said, but there are 23 flats where police have not been able to trace anyone alive who lived there. Instead they are trying to gather information by listening to all 26 999 calls from that night from people who said they were inside one of those 23 flats.

Detectives have appealed for information about who else might have been in the block that night and are looking at “all imaginable sources” of information about who could have been inside those flats, including talking to fast food delivery companies and schools, she said.

Talking to survivors seeking help at the Westway relief centre reveals some of the complexities facing police, particularly around the number of unregistered residents. One man said he had been sleeping on a sofa with friends who lived on the 22nd floor for months, because he was homeless after a marital problems; he was not registered to live there, but had lost all his belongings. He survived because he was at the local mosque at the time of the fire.

Another man had returned from America, where he was with his girlfriend, who recently gave birth to their child. He had let a family friend stay in his flat; she now faces homelessness because she was not registered at the address. A teenage boy said he was sharing a one-bedroom flat with his aunt because it was cheaper than renting a two-bedroom property, but he, too, was not registered to live in the block.

In an emailed response, the Metropolitan police said the names of the deceased would only be published once formal identification has taken place, with the agreement of the coroner and the family.

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“The complexity of this work should not be underestimated. The Metropolitan police service understands the distress and desire for answers and we remain committed to providing answers as soon as we possibly can,” the statement added.

Asked why lists of residents, survivors and presumed victims were not being released, the Grenfell Response Team, which has taken over the crisis response from the local council, said: “We know that around 80 people have been confirmed dead at this point in time, and that the police have said they expect this number to increase. There is a complex mapping exercise under way to establish the number of households and people who were in the tower at the time of the fire.”

A member of the local residents committee, who asked not to be named, acknowledged that there was “unhappiness about the numbers”, adding: “I tend to subscribe to the cockup rather than conspiracy theory. They are shifting through ash and trying to work out what is human ash and what is a chair leg. They are talking about this going on until December. I do feel a certain sympathy.”