NEWS LFB personnel testify at Grenfell inquiry


THE INQUIRY heard from incident commanders and London Fire Brigade (LFB) commissioner Dany Cotton, while it was revealed that a training exercise at Grenfell, days before the fire, had been cancelled. Evening Standard reported on incident commander Richard Welch’s testimony, in which he stated that the situation was ‘Armageddon’, and told survivors and victim’s families that ‘we are very sorry for the amount of people we lost that night. We couldn’t have done any more, we did everything we could. Every one of us that went into that building was willing to lose our own lives to save your loved ones. We didn’t let you down, the building let us all down and I’m sorry for your loss’. Mr Welch said that he was ‘forced


to restrict’ how far the firefighters were sent ‘for their own safety’, and had ‘briefly served’ as incident commander before ‘realising a more senior officer was present’, becoming fire sector commander ‘overseeing the whole building’. As teams struggled to get past the 11th floor, Mr Welch had breathing apparatus crews ‘returning from trying to get past’, whose condition, he felt, was ‘very close to losing their own lives’. Although this was ‘the hardest


decision’ of his life, he felt he had to stop them going higher, with the 11th to 15th floors considered ‘too dangerous to send crews beyond’. Instead, firefighters tried to extinguish a heat barrier that would allow another team with breathing equipment to get further up, influenced by the knowledge that residents’ 999 calls were ‘one by one, falling silent’. Despite being given this


information, Mr Welch ‘failed to check’ that vital information about rescue missions had been passed to 999 operators. He reported that he had ‘closely’ monitored information about residents from the control room, but ‘did not ensure the hub was kept abreast of progress on scene’, attributing this to his ‘faith’ that officers underneath him in the hierarchy ‘were carrying out this task’, so he ‘did not investigate further’.


The Guardian and Evening


Standard both reported on testimony from incident commander Andrew O’Loughlin, who stated that the tower ‘should have protected itself’, and claimed that another such fire ‘couldn’t be managed’. He noted that he had expected


only ‘one or two’ flats to catch fire ‘if we were unlucky’ after the fire spread via cladding, having ‘immediately recognised’ that the spread was ‘exceptional’, but believing that it had ‘possibly done its worst’ when he arrived at 1.55am. However, he noted that his original estimations were ‘probably too low’, and there was ‘no reason’ to believe the fire would spread to the other three sides or move beyond individual flats. Mr O’Loughlin expected that the


concrete building ‘should protect itself’ stating: ‘At this time, I concluded that the speed and violence of the fire was in our favour. The cladding was rapidly burning and falling off the building and the fire had already hit the roof, so shouldn’t really go any further. It’s understood that fires travel vertically and only travel a little bit horizontally sometimes, perhaps to a flat next door, but they don’t tend to go downwards. ‘My expectation was that if


we were unlucky, perhaps one or two flats, with open windows, could catch light, but it looked, at this point, as though the fire had possibly done its worst on the east elevation. I concluded that this was actually


8 NOVEMBER 2018 www.frmjournal.com


helpful for us, as the cladding had effectively burnt off the building, leaving only pockets of fire.’ He commented that firefighters


were ‘having to take a reasonably high level of risk to rescue members of the public, whilst knowing that despite our efforts a large number of people were still going to die. The only plan for a future incident would be to not let it happen in the first place, as it couldn’t be managed’. He was only informed of the stay put change 25 minutes afterwards, and received no updates from those coordinating calls. He stated: ‘The building was so


horrendous several hours later that I think no one should have lived in the building. So to say we should have changed the “stay-put” advice, I don’t think would have been reasonable based on something that happened several hours later that none of us could ever have expected.’ Mr O’Loughlin was ‘confused'


by the policy change, adding: ‘You wouldn’t expect fire to spread around the building like it did on the outside, and for it to fail so catastrophically, we’d never expected or anticipated that it would do that in the way it did, and then similarly… we would not expect the internal protection to fail so badly as well. So my expectation was people who were safe in their flats should stay safe in their flats.’ Inquiry counsel Richard Millett asked: ‘On what you later discovered


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