‘My body is still shaking today’: How Grenfell survivors were abandoned in the days after the tragedy | Grenfell Tower fire

Maryam Adam said her whole body shook as she recalled the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire and its immediate aftermath.

She was three months pregnant when she escaped the blaze and found herself outside, dismayed, watching the flames rise up the 24-storey block of flats in west London as her neighbours screamed for help.

In the hours and days that followed, she and her community were abandoned and left to fend for themselves. “They treated us really badly. The council and the government let us down,” Adam, 48, said in tears. “I didn’t get any help from my council at first.”

Adam, who had suffered miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, had resigned herself to sleeping on the floor of her temporary accommodation because the bed was too high for her to fit in. She ended up staying in the hotel for five months, alternating between a mattress on the floor and a sofa bed, all the while worrying about her pregnancy.

A seven-year public inquiry culminated on Wednesday in a report that laid bare not only systemic failings in the run-up to the 2017 fire, but also how survivors were “totally let down” in the aftermath.

He said the emergency response by the government and the local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), was “confused, slow, indecisive and piecemeal”, and that some aspects demonstrated “a marked lack of respect for human decency and dignity”.

In a 1,700-page report, the panel led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick detailed how survivors were abandoned with no information about where to go or what to do, in scenes that have been compared to a “horror film” and a “war zone”. The report said many residents walked in the early hours of the morning to community centres that had opened in the absence of support from the authorities.

The report also said that people desperately searching for their loved ones felt a sense of “total helplessness and despair”. “It quickly became apparent to them that neither the municipal representatives nor the tenant management body were able to provide them with even the most basic information,” it added.

As a result, he added, the community felt compelled to compile its own list of the missing and form its own views on what had happened.

Adam, who was born in Somalia and raised in Sudan, described how she was one of the first to escape the fire, which broke out in her neighbour’s fourth-floor flat, fleeing in just her slippers and pyjamas. She slept briefly in a neighbour’s car before walking to the Clement James Centre, which had opened. She fell ill and was taken to hospital by ambulance.

“At the hospital they said the baby was breathing well and as soon as I heard that I left,” she recalls.

She and her husband, Abdulwahab, were keen to speak to the council before it closed for the day to arrange temporary accommodation, but she didn’t get a call back. She ended up going to the council building herself and was eventually given an Oyster card to travel and stay in a hotel temporarily.

But Adam, who suffered from a herniated disc, said the bed was too high and that the hotel only provided them with breakfast and lunch and did not take into account that his husband was observing Ramadan.

Moore-Bick’s report highlighted this shortcoming, saying that Muslim residents were not provided with halal food and that it was not possible to meet the requirement to eat at set times.

The council had “no regard for their cultural or religious needs” and people suffered “a significant degree of discrimination that could and would have been avoided if the guidelines had been properly followed”, the report said.

“We do not believe that these are isolated incidents limited to a few individuals and families. The evidence suggests that the experiences of those, particularly from Muslim and ethnic minority communities, whose basic needs have not been met are symptomatic of a broader systemic failure by the RBKC to think about and plan for these needs,” he added.

In many cases, the RBKC failed to provide adequate emergency accommodation and its allocation was “confused and inconsistent,” the report said. There were reports of people being placed in rooms on upper floors – after fleeing a burning building – or in areas far from hospitals where their loved ones were being treated.

In other cases, families of four or five were given a single room, while cots were not available. The incident also highlighted Adam’s plight, forced to sleep on the couch or on the floor.

There was also some confusion about what provisions were available. One survivor, who lost her son in the fire, told the inquest she did not know she was entitled to food and so had limited herself to one meal a day. Others had heard the council would only pay for drinks, so they only ordered drinks.

The conditions for obtaining food in some hotels made some people “feel like refugees,” the report said. “Survivors described this situation as living in limbo, with no space to heal.”

The difficulties in providing financial assistance to victims were also considerable, and some were even denied any assistance. “Although they did not feel ready to do so, some felt that they had to return to work shortly after the fire, simply because they could not afford to do otherwise,” the report states.

Psychological support available after the fire was limited. Some survivors described how they had struggled with their mental health and were desperate for help but did not know where to get it.

Adam and her husband have now been placed in Kensington, where they are raising their six-year-old son, Mohammed. “But when I remember that night, my whole body still shakes today,” she says.

Elizabeth Campbell, the RBKC’s leader, said the council had apologised unreservedly for its failings, adding: “We fully accept the findings (of the inquiry), which are a scathing critique of a system that is broken from top to bottom.

“This demonstrates beyond any doubt that this council failed the residents of Grenfell Tower and the 72 people, including 18 children, who died.

“We failed to ensure the safety of people before and during the renovation and we failed to treat them with humanity and care after the events. We will learn from every criticism contained in the report.”