Fire engulfed a 24-storey housing block in central London in the early hours of last Wednesday, killing at least 17 people and injuring 74 others in an inferno that trapped residents as they slept.

Some residents screamed for help from behind upper floor windows, some tried to throw children to safety, as flames raced through the high-rise Grenfell Tower block of apartments in the north Kensington area after taking hold just before 1:00am.

Architect Gloria Trevisan was on the phone with her family in Italy when she became part of a grim statistic — another victim of this week’s inferno at London’s Grenfell Tower.

‘Gloria died while on the phone with her mother,’ said family attorney Maria Cristina Sandrin, reports  CNN.

‘I am going to heaven,’ Trevisan said, according to Sandrin. ‘I will help you from up there.’

‘We could see a lot of children and parents screaming ‘Help! Help! Help!’ and putting their hands on the window and asking to help them,’ said Amina Sharif, a witness, Reuters reported.

‘We could do nothing and we could see the stuff on the side was falling off, collapsing. We were just standing screaming and they were screaming.’

Another witness, Saimar Lleshi, saw people tying together sheets in an attempt to escape.

‘I saw three people putting sheets together to climb down, but no one climbed down. I don’t know what happened to them.

‘Even when the lights went off, people were waving with white shirts to be seen,’ Lleshi said.

More than 200 firefighters, backed up by 40 fire engines, fought for hours to try to bring the blaze, one of the biggest seen in central London in memory, under control.

By mid-day, London police said six people had been killed and they cautioned the death toll was likely to rise.

Police Commander Stuart Cundy said a ‘recovery operation’ could take some time and there could be people in the building who are unaccounted for, though he would not be drawn on a figure.

Fire-fighting crews still had to reach the top four floors of the building where several hundred people live in 130 apartments.

The cause of the inferno, which left the tower block a charred, smoking shell, was not immediately known.

The block had recently undergone an $11.08 million refurbishment of the exterior, which included new external cladding and replacement windows.

Black smoke billowed high into the air for hours after the blaze broke out. Residents rushed to escape through smoke-filled corridors after being woken up by the smell of burning.

London Fire Brigade said the fire engulfed all floors from the second to the top of the 24-storey block. There were reports that some residents leapt out of windows to escape the flames.

Other witnesses spoke of children, including a baby, being thrown to safety, from windows high up.

‘In my 29 years of being a fire fighter, I have never ever seen anything of this scale,’ London Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton told reporters.

London mayor Sadiq Khan said the fire raised questions over safety of high-rise blocks like Grenfell Tower.

More than 12 hours after the fire broke out, the building was still smouldering, though the building was not in danger of collapse.