The firefighters who responded to the Grenfell Tower fire, including the emergency fire control operators who took dreadfully distressing calls, acted with courage, professionalism and dedication, rescuing many people. Without them, there would have been far more deaths. It is a source of deep concern and sorrow that they were not able to rescue more.
They do not deserve, and they can do without, armchair critics such as the writer Andrew O’Hagan, editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, telling them “the firefighting effort wasn’t all that it could have been”. They can do without the Sunday Times columnist Sarah Baxter saying “the fire brigade certainly let people down”, seeming to regard firefighters as “jobsworths” who “stick to the rigid demands of bureaucratic protocol” and bow to “the bureaucratic gods of health and safety”.
Both these writers have prejudged the evidence due to be heard at the public inquiry. Their assessments are based on a lack of understanding of challenges facing firefighters and the fire service. If more people thought about health and safety, the disaster might never have happened.
We await the findings of the public inquiry, but it has been clear from the earliest accounts of that night that firefighters faced an unprecedented catastrophe and they responded by going above and beyond the call of duty. Normal working procedures that are in place to keep firefighters as safe as possible while tackling fires could not be applied. Firefighters adapted what they did in order to maximise the number of people they could rescue. Firefighters themselves do not use the term “heroic”, but I have no hesitation in calling their actions that night just that.
The Grenfell Tower fire was an unprecedented disaster the likes of which no British firefighter will have witnessed before and will hopefully will never see again. I was a firefighter for more than two decades, and I have been in the fire and rescue industry for 35 years. I have never in my professional life seen firefighters have to deal with a fire on that scale and with such a risk to life. I have never seen firefighters have to do the things they did on that terrible night. I am proud, humbled and for ever in awe of the work they did. I can only imagine their emotions as they headed to Grenfell seeing the block ablaze from miles away.
The firefighters who were given a round of applause by the Grenfell community as they returned back to their fire stations are now facing trial by the media. It is both disgraceful and heartbreaking.
Journalists seem to forget that we had a 24-storey tower block in the middle of one of the wealthiest boroughs in one of the world’s richest cities that was effectively coated in petrol. If non-flammable cladding had been used on the building, the fire would most probably have been contained to the floor it started on.
Baxter asks why the emergency services didn’t save more lives. She blames the longstanding “stay put” policy for high-rise fires. She, unlike the firefighters who were there, is not legally prevented from saying whatever she likes. The Fire Brigades Union hopes the Grenfell Tower inquiry, of which we are a core participant, investigates this issue forensically. There are indeed difficult and complex issues to be addressed.
Tower blocks are designed so if a fire breaks out in a property, the blaze can be held there for a length of time, allowing fire crews to respond. This is called compartmentation. It clearly failed at Grenfell Tower. The “stay put” policy may well have to be changed, particularly after this failure of compartmentation at Grenfell, but we will not prejudge the inquiry before it has heard the evidence on this, and we don’t think newspaper pundits should either.
I am entirely confident that those taking emergency calls, the firefighters and fire officers attending the incident did their utmost on the night and at the incident to save as many lives as they could. Regrettably, they operated in an impossible situation because the fire was on such an unprecedented scale
It is appalling that Grenfell firefighters are being denigrated in this way. We are all aware that the inquiry will be a difficult and traumatic process, to be conducted without fear or favour and without undue deference to vested interests including those of the fire service.
However, the danger is that this negative media campaign diverts attention away from more fundamental questions about the fire safety regime that created such a fire risk at Grenfell Tower.