Grenfell Inquiry day 31: firefighter describes ‘incredibly difficult’ task of recording information

Firefighters have previously told the inquiry about their lack of training for the specific circumstances of the Grenfell Tower fire.

This continued today, with experienced firefighter Glynn Williams revealing that his training had never included cladding fires or the full or partial evacuation of a high-rise residential block.

Mr Williams said: “We do not receive training on how to evacuate people through a toxic environment.”

He added: “If you’re at an incident and fire survival guidance [FSG] is implemented, we don’t do any training that would mean we would take a conscious and breathing casualty into a toxic environment.”

Firefighters, however, improvised on the night, using training intended to rescue firefighters who become trapped to rescue Grenfell residents. In situations like this, firefighters take in spare breathing apparatus for their trapped colleagues to wear.

Mr Williams said he saw one firefighter leading a young girl out of the tower wearing spare breathing apparatus. He gave the girl his helmet to protect her from falling debris and burning plastic rain falling from the building.

On the night, it was Mr Williams’ job to stand at the bottom of the tower recording information coming in through FSG calls with residents.

With whiteboard space used up, he was writing on the wall of the tower in the lobby. He would write down a flat number to indicate that people needed rescuing, write ‘BA’ when firefighters with breathing apparatus had been sent there and tick the flat off when those firefighters returned.

He admitted that with the volume of information coming in, some of it was unreliable and therefore he could have been ticking off flats that firefighters hadn’t been to, which could have led to those flats being overlooked in subsequent rescue efforts.

He said: “It is a priority to rescue people who need rescuing, but we’re asking firefighters to ascend a tower to their potential death. It’s really important that we don’t do that needlessly.”

The inquiry heard that Mr Williams did not know how many floors were in the tower and did not have access to a floor plan of the building, while firefighters returning to the ground from higher levels repeatedly described the conditions as “confusing and disorientating”.

The bridgehead told him at one stage that firefighters would no longer “be committing above a certain floor”, he said, though he was unable to recall which storey became the cut-off.

He said that he was trying his “utmost” to collate and transfer details coming from FSG calls and survivors to the fire brigade’s bridgehead, but that “it was proving an incredibly difficult task” due to the volume of information he received.

The task of tracking where people were trapped within the tower was made harder by the fact that people were not always being rescued from where they had been recorded through an FSG call, he suggested, as firefighters encountered them while they tried to escape or take refuge in another flat.

Some FSG call information also appeared to miss him completely and go straight to the bridgehead, he said.

And he described how as the night wore on, he was able to obtain “less and less information” by speaking to rescued people and firefighters – which he took as a sign that conditions in the tower were “rapidly deteriorating”.

At one point, he requested a marker pen to write down the flat number where casualties had been found on their forehead or arm. However, many were not even certain where they had been when found by firefighters, he told the inquiry, and it became “nigh on impossible” to correlate information about the location of residents in the building.

The hearing continues.