It’s a disturbing charge: That the Grenfell fire crews were more concerned with tick-box rules than saving lives. Our investigation proves otherwise
By Paul Bracchi and Tim Stewart
Shortly before they began ascending Grenfell tower — up the only (perilously narrow) flight of stairs in the blazing building — members of london Fire Brigade observed an unwritten protocol reserved for the most dire emergencies: they wrote their names on the side of their helmets.
there is only one reason a firefighter ever does this: for identification purposes in case the unthinkable happens, which, in the early hours of June 14 last year, was a frighteningly real possibility.
‘I thought I might not be coming out,’ a fireman on duty that night explained without exaggeration or bravado. ‘During my 13 years with the service, I’ve never had to sign my helmet before. Never.’
the haunting image of crews, with breathing masks and oxygen cylinders strapped to their backs, trooping into the inferno with their yellow helmets bearing their names (‘Mick *****,’ Pete *****,’ Gary *****’ ) is an answer to those who, in recent weeks, may have been questioning their quiet, unheralded courage that night.
theirs is a story which has been all but forgotten — dismissed, even — especially now, when the brigade’s policy of asking people to remain in their flats was blamed at the public inquiry into the disaster for the terrible loss of life.
Behind the 72 deaths are heartbreaking and harrowing personal tragedies: the man who lost six members of his family, the wife whose husband jumped from the 23rd floor, the father grieving the loss of his five-year-old son, and the parents who lost their unborn child because of the delay in getting out — all victims, we are told, of the controversial ‘stay put’ advice.
Under such a tragic backdrop, it is perhaps understandable that our once unshakeable faith in our fire service should be challenged. But the furore over the controversial ‘stay put’ policy has resulted in what the Fire Brigades Union believes is unfair criticism of its rank and file members.
General secretary Matt Wrack said firefighters who were clapped and cheered by the Grenfell community as they returned to their stations are now facing trial by media, which is ‘both disgraceful and heartbreaking’. ‘Armchair critics’, he called them. one was Andrew o’hagan, who spent ten months investigating the Grenfell catastrophe for an excoriating report for the london review of Books, and said it was ‘not a great night’ for the fire service when he was interviewed on radio 4’s today programme.
Sarah Baxter, deputy editor of the Sunday times, was also singled out. ‘Why,’ she wrote, ‘didn’t the emergency services save more lives? Why did the jobsworths in the fire brigade stick to the rigid demands of bureaucratic protocol when it was obvious that the flames were raging out of control?’ before reminding us more than 300 New york fire crew died during the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers.
‘Do you have to die to be a “hero”?’ one of the firemen we spoke to this week asked rhetorically. his sense of injustice is shared by many in the london Fire Brigade, who feel they have been hung out to dry over Grenfell. Parallels have been drawn between Grenfell and the Manchester Arena bombing last May, where, it has now been revealed, fire crew were held back ‘by risk-averse’ officers in case a terrorist gunman remained on the loose. Bureaucratic protocols, in other words, came before saving lives.
But what has emerged from our inquiries into Grenfell over the course of the past few weeks, is a dramatically different narrative.
‘the rules were broken at Grenfell — in order to save lives,’ said one of the firemen who met us.
his version of events is backed up by others.
the fireman, one of a number we spoke to, asked to remain anonymous because members of the london Fire Brigade have been instructed not to speak to the Press. they fear being disciplined and even losing their jobs if they dare to speak out.
he is a husband and father in his 40s who has to do a second job to supplement his £2,000-a-month take-home pay as a fireman. Bear that in mind when you read what follows.
the ‘rules’ — which prevented firefighters entering Manchester Arena for two hours — are contained in the home office’s ‘operational guidance for the fire and rescue service’.
Under those same rules, fire crew should not have even gone into Grenfell tower because, according to a risk assessment carried out after the blaze started that night, it was in danger of collapsing.
Firefighters were officially informed of this by Dany Cotton, the female commissioner of the london Fire Brigade, who addressed staff at the scene, in North Kensington, london, at the height of the unfolding tragedy.
‘Go in and get people out,’ she told them. ‘Forget protocol. Forget the rulebook.’ But, crucially, she also admitted that she couldn’t
order them to go into the building — it was up to each individual fireman to make his own decision in those circumstances.
All of the firefighters gathered around her — that’s more than 200 men and women — went in.
So there are no similarities, in this respect, between Grenfell and Manchester. the health and safety protocols might have been the same, but they were interpreted very differently by the two respective brigades.
According to the rules, firefighters should have come back out of Grenfell tower when radio communication broke down almost immediately after the fire started. Instead, they stayed inside, trying to save lives.
Furthermore, firefighters are instructed never to remove their breathing apparatus when fighting a blaze. that night, they ignored this rule, too, sharing their oxygen masks with residents of Grenfell tower, who might not otherwise have made it out alive. the rules
‘Forget the rulebook. Forget protocol. Get in there and get people out’
‘I came across a woman’s body. Was she alive?’
also, say firefighters, should never allow the oxygen in their tanks to reach dangerously low levels either. This is known in the trade as the ‘ time of whistle’ — so called because an alarm sounds within the breathing apparatus about ten minutes before the air runs out. Many firefighters ignored this ‘whistle’ and carried on trying to rescue people for as long as was humanly possible.
‘There were whistles going off everywhere,’ said the fireman.
He arrived at the scene of the disaster along with colleagues from Red Watch, the night shift, soon after 1am. By then, the fire, which had started in flat 16 on the fourth floor, had burned through the plastic window frames and ignited combustible materials in the external cladding.
On the floor below, a ‘bridgehead’ — a safe position inside the building from which to direct operations — was established.
It was here that crews from across the capital assembled, like soldiers before battle, and prepared to enter the unknown.
What was it like for crew who bravely ventured above the ‘bridgehead’ in the early hours of June 14, 2017? The following, almost visceral account, posted on Facebook by one who was there, is probably as close as anyone has got to reliving the horror.
‘We made our way up a crowded stairwell struggling to make progress, at times unable to pass because of the people on the stairs,’ he wrote. The stairwells were full of other BA (breathing apparatus) crews bringing people down in various states and conditions.
‘The smoke grew thicker with each floor we went up. No proper floor numbers on the stairwells a after the 5th floor made it hard to k know where you were. Someone before us tried to write them on the wall but that didn’t last long. T The dirty smoke was covering the w walls with a film of blackness.
‘Around the 9th floor, we lost all v visibility and the heat was rising. Still, we continued up and through the blackness. We reached what we believed to be the 19/20th floor but there was no way to tell.
‘It was here we found a couple t trying to find their way out, panicking, choking, blinded by the thick, toxic air. A quick (oxygen level) gauge check showed us that t the amount of floors we’d climbed had taken its toll, we were getting low on air . . .’
The fireman and his partner did eventually make it out with two casualties.
There is one more thing you should know. The ‘partner’ was a female firefighter — and she had recently become a mother.
Our source experienced the same harrowing ‘journey’ up the tower.
Almost immediately after entering, the radio frequency used to communicate with people inside the building failed. So, the fireman could speak to officers outside but not to colleagues inside, which in the midst of a fire is vital.
Put simply, those outside have a better appreciation of how the fire is spreading but do not have upto-date information about casualties or whether crews might need assistance and where.
He and his partner carried on, eventually reaching the higher floors (we cannot specify exactly which one because such information risks identifying him) where they found the lifeless body of a woman on the landing.
The rule, in these circumstances, is to leave the dead where they are and concentrate on the living. But how can one know for sure whether a casualty is dead or just unconscious?
The fireman we interviewed couldn’t be sure on this occasion, so he and his partner decided to carry the woman out. It took about 20 minutes to get her down a few flights of stairs. Our fireman takes up the story: ‘At this point, the whistle [on my breathing apparatus] started blowing, which meant I had only a few minutes of oxygen left,’ he said.
To this day, he is not sure if the woman on the landing was still alive or not.
The fireman himself made it out with about ‘30 seconds of air’ left in his tank. Asked about the ‘stay put’ policy, he replied: ‘I came across a number of bodies in the stairwell. Did they die because they stayed in their flats and left it too late to get out [the fate of most victims, reportedly]? I just don’t know. It was bedlam in there.’
The ‘stay put’ policy has been central to fire safety advice for housing blocks since the Fifties. It is based on the principle of compartmentation, that fire is not supposed to be able to spread from one unit to another. Residents should evacuate only if their own flat is on fire – everyone else, generally, is thought safe to remain.
At Grenfell, the ‘stay put’ policy had ‘effectively failed’ within 30 minutes of firefighters attending the first call to the emergency services at 12.54am on June 14 last year, the public inquiry into the disaster heard. Fire was spreading in a way it was not expected to. But residents, however, were not told to evacuate until 2.47am.
These events are the subject of a criminal investigation by the Metropolitan Police, which says it has an ‘ absolute obligation’ to consider whether the performance of the London Fire Brigade contributed to the death toll.
But there are other mitigating caveats for the London Fire Brigade — mentioned in the report presented to the Grenfell inquiry this week by fire safety expert Dr Barbara Lane — which have gone unreported.
Alerting residents, door-to-door, she said, would have required ‘significant resources.’
Consider the fact that at 1.14am only four fire engines and around 16 firefighters were at the scene. That’s 16 crew and 294 occupants in 129 flats over 23 storeys to contact while also trying to tackle the blaze.
A call to increase the response to ‘make pumps eight’ [eight engines] was made at 1.19am to ‘ make pumps ten’ at 1.24am, and ‘make pumps 25’ at 1.31am. Eventually, more than 200 firefighters were involved in the operation.
So, to clarify, at 1.14am, when the ‘stay put’ policy was clearly beginning to fail, only a handful of firefighters were at Grenfell.
By 1.40am — just 26 minutes later — the stairs were choked with smoke and toxic gases which, the inquiry was told, were ‘ severely affecting the ability of residents to escape and firefighters to rescue’.
Of course — with the benefit of hindsight — residents should have been evacuated after 1.40am. But it was far from the straightforward decision it has sometimes been made out to be.
Dr Lane acknowledges this in her report. ‘I do not wish to imply this was an easy decision to make during the unfolding and complex events that occurred during the Grenfell Tower fire,’ she said.
In fact, fire commanders — without the benefit of hindsight — decided that ordering a mass evacuation down a single, narrow staircase that was choked with toxic smoke could have caused more loss of life.
And, how could they have known that virtually every aspect of fire safety in the block — the flammable cladding and ineffective fire doors on flats to name but two — had failed?
Even as late as 2.45am, the brigade still believed they had a ‘real chance’ of reaching residents stranded on the upper floors. Megaphones were used to communicate with those trapped inside the tower.
‘There were some [residents] that had linked up some bedding and started to climb down that,’ one fire officer revealed in his statement to the inquiry.
‘I just started shouting: “Stay where you are, stay where you are.” ‘At that point, I still believed we had a real chance of getting them out. That was the best chance of survival.’
Of the 294 people who lived in Grenfell Tower, 72 died, 223 escaped and 65 were rescued by the London Fire Brigade. That’s 65 lives which might have been lost if it wasn’t for the men and women of the London Fire Brigade.