HORROR WILL
communal entranceentra are legally required to have regular fire safetysafet audits. These include re residential blocks, offices, sh shops and factories. There is non specific timeframe,timeframe though industryindustr experts say best practicep is every 12 months. ONE of the first firefighters to reach the Grenfell Tower blaze revealed he will forever be haunted by the faces of trapped children that he was unable to save. In a harrowing account, Damian Magee told how he looked up at kids with faces pressed against windows and banging the glass for help. “They were looking down at me like I was a superhero who had arrived to save them,” Damian said in an exclusive interview with the Sunday People. “But we couldn’t reach them. The horror of what I saw will stay with me for the rest of my life.” Damian’s crew sprinted half a mile through a traffic jam to get to the inferno, before ditching their breathing apparatus to climb as high as the ninth floor. In the first detailed insight from a firefighter inside the tower he has revealed the terror they faced as they battled in vain to save the people who perished. The 20-year veteran, who carried five people to safety, broke down in tears as he said: “These little boys were looking at me when I turned up in my superhero outfit, but I knew we couldn’t save them.” The crew manager at Whitechapel Fire Station, in East London, says his team got the call at 2am on Tuesday morning – an hour after the fire had taken hold. He said: “They said it was a 40-pump fire. Nobody’s ever heard of a 40-pump fire, let alone been in one. We could not believe what our eyes were showing us. We’d never seen anything like that before.” Minutes later, they were on the ground, racing on foot through heavy traffic. Damian, a 45-year-old dad of one, said: “We had to jump out and grab the breathing apparatus and run half a mile The fire and rescue authorities with the biggest fall in safety audits are Lincolnshire, where they are down 88 per cent. In Kent it is 80 per cent.
Others showing a big drop include Northumberland, down 78 per cent, and West Yorkshire on 72 per cent.
Former fire brigade safety inspector David Sibert, now a fire safety adviser to the FBU, said: “These figures are indicative of a significant reduction in the number of fire safety inspecting officers around the country. So the capacity of the fire service to go into detail when looking at fire risk has been harmed.
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“In years gone by, when fire services had quite large fire safety departments, inspections were carried out at most large buildings every year. Today, fire safety departments are less than half the size they used to be.” Ministers