Inch by inch they sifted debris for the awful truth
FACED with the harrowing scenes of devastation inside Grenfell Tower, even the most hardened and dedicated police officers doubted they would be able to find, let alone identify, everyone who had perished.
In some parts of the 24- storey building, the inferno had reached temperatures of more than 1,000C, devouring all in its path, leaving little but blackened dust and 15 tons of debris strewn across each of the tower block’s charred floors.
‘When I went into the tower for the first time four days after the fire and saw the devastation, I was genuinely concerned that due to the intensity and duration of the fire we may not find, recover and identify all those who died,’ Metropolitan Police Commander Stuart Cundy said yesterday.
But five months later – and after the Met’s biggest non-terror-related investigation – police believe that all those who died have been recovered and identified, with the final death toll at 71, including a stillborn baby. So how did they do it? By June 16, two days after the fire, 12 bodies had been taken to the mortuary. Searchers, assisted by sniffer dogs, had recovered the bodies of 11 people, and one person had died in hospital.
By July, all ‘visible human remains’ had been removed from the building, but dozens of people were still unaccounted for. This was when the work of the specially-trained, 42-member search and recovery team really began.
On their hands and knees, wearing breathing masks and head torches, and equipped with small trowels, shovels and sieves, they scoured every square inch of each of the 129 flats, and all the communal areas in a forensic finger-tip search.
Over the weeks, their painstaking and grim task moved from finding visible body parts to searching for the tiniest fragments of human remains.
‘Those sieves are going down to a 6mm size so that we guarantee we can pick up small fragments of bone, teeth – any identifiable part of the human body,’ said Sergeant Alistair Hutchins, of the Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) Unit. He and a colleague started searching Grenfell – the worst incident Hutchins has dealt with in 18 years of DVI work – even as firefighters were still tackling the blaze on the upper floors during the early hours of June 14.
Floor numbers were painted in bright yellow on the charred walls to help the team – comprised of 12 victim identification experts, 24 search officers and six forensic archaeologists – keep track of where they were. All the debris was packaged, and marked with the floor number and flat number of where it was found.
Experts work to identify the bodies of unknown victims according to standards set by Interpol. This includes dental records, fingerprints or DNA. Medical implants that carry serial numbers, such as pacemakers or artificial hips, can be used as secondary identifiers, as can scars, marks and tattoos.
Where DNA can be extracted from remains, it must then be matched with that of potential victims. This would normally be taken from personal items, such as a toothbrush or comb belonging to the victim. However, in this disaster, such ‘surrogate samples’ of DNA were destroyed.
Scientists had only bone fragments to work with in some cases, requiring new and highly sensitive, analytical techniques, and drawing on the expertise of investigators who worked at the World Trade Centre site after the 2001 terror attacks.
Searching for, recovering and identifying the remains of those who died, was only part of the mammoth task the police faced.
Establishing exactly who was in Grenfell Tower on the night of the fire, and who was missing or presumed dead, also presented an enormous challenge.
In the days following the fire, there was a confused picture, not least because of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the electoral roll and in tenancy records.
THEpolice took thousands of calls from people reporting someone they knew to be in, or believed to be in, Grenfell that night. Each call was logged and investigated. A day after the fire, the Met had 400 people listed as missing.
‘That included reconciling multiple missing reports of the same person, for example, one person was reported 46 separate times,’ a Met spokesman said. ‘Some were reported under a number of different names, even the slightest differences in spellings had to be thoroughly investigated and reconciled. Until that process was complete, those people continued to be regarded as missing.’
Another aspect of police work has been investigating fraudulent claims by individuals who claimed to have lost family members in the fire, with the intention of benefiting from the tragedy. Earlier this month, one man pleaded guilty to fraud, after claiming his wife and son died in the fire, and there are ongoing fraud investigations.
CCTV footage and video from police body cameras has proved of enormous value in helping police identify those who fled Grenfell Tower after the fire started just before 1am. Indeed, police believe this has provided the most accurate record of who was in the Tower that night, because there was just ‘one route in and out’. Other areas of inquiry to establish who lived in the flats involved contacting takeaway food outlets in the area to see if orders had been taken for Grenfell Tower that night.
They believe 293 people were in Grenfell when the fire started, and 223 escaped.
The police hope that by providing such a detailed account of their investigation, they will have countered claims of a political cover-up of ‘the true number of victims’.
In the immediate aftermath of the blaze, a hard-Left pro-Corbyn internet blog called Skwawkbox reported that officials had issued a ‘D-notice’ (an official request to editors not to publish sensitive information) banning publication of the death toll. The story was false, but it was picked up by several other online news outlets.
Cmdr Cundy said yesterday: ‘I think there will still be speculation, but why on earth would we want to be covering any of this up? We have put huge energy and effort from a huge team to get to this point. I am incredibly proud of this work which has taken place in incredibly challenging conditions.’