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to get to the building. The heat coming off it was incredible but the thing that haunts me now is the screams.
“There were people in all the windows. We could just hear screaming – particularly children.”
He added: “It was like a war zone. There were huge clumps of concrete, composite materials, metal, all sorts of cladding, all crashing around the four sides of the building.
“We were looking up and waiting for gaps and telling people to leg it. We were have already vowed to review safety systems like fitting internal sprinklers at high-rises.
Sprinklers have been compulsory in new tall buildings in England for a decade. But despite repeated calls for them to be fitted in older buildings, very few have been installed.
It is feared rain cladding used on Grenfell Tower in a major refurbishment last year may have helped the inferno spread rapidly, trapping many residents in their flats. Flammable running the gauntlet.” Once he battled his way inside, he saw colleagues coming down the stairs “battered”, he says, adding “Their kits were smoking – that’s when you’re nearly combusting yourself, because you’re so hot.”
His crew knew the 20 minutes of air their air tanks held would not be enough to carry them high inside the 24-floor building, so they ditched them to save weight and concentrated on the lower floors. Rules say Damian’s team should not have gone beyond the ground floor external cladding similar to the one used at Grenfell was blamed for a high-rise block fire in the Australian city of Melbourne in 2004.
In a report on that blaze, firefighters said the main reason no one died was the “excellent performance of the internal fire sprinkler system”.
Questions are also being asked about whether firefighters are suitably equipped to tackle fires in high-rise buildings after it emerged that not one fire appliance in the UK would have without theirs. But they put their lives at risk to go as high as the ninth floor, helping carry people down to safety while hauling heavy hoses up the stairs.
He said: “People were taking deep breaths and going back up. They were going above and beyond.”
“I went straight back in and I could see a lady holding her kid up at the window, looking down on us.
“I was thinking... she was telling her children they were going to be OK, because they were looking down on 40
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or 50 firefighters. They thought they were going to be saved, but we couldn’t save them.” He added: “I watched families die and I feel terrible. I couldn’t do anything for that lady and that kid.”
As the aftermath of the blaze continues to be felt, Damian said those who fought the fire with him will be left haunted forever.
He said: “We’ve trained for high-rise jobs – a flat in a high rise building on fire.
“But none of us has trained for an entire building to be completely ablaze.” been tall enough to reach the top of Grenfell. Chiefs had to borrow a 138ft aerial platform from Surrey fire brigade to tackle the blaze. But it could not reach the top of the 230ft tower.
London Fire Brigade said the bigger trucks would be not be practical in the capital because they “require more room and carry more weight”.
Meanwhile, officials have defended spending levels on fire and rescue services, saying safety audits have increased in some areas, including Greater Manchester and Durham.
And despite a small increase in 2015 to 2016, fire deaths have fallen by 22 per cent and reported fires by 52 per cent over the past ten years.
The Home Office said last night: “Government and fire authorities invest significantly in fire prevention and the total number of fires attended has fallen by half over the last ten years.”