The Grenfell Tower fire was “hell” and “like a warzone”, one of the first firefighters to tackle the blaze last year has told the inquiry into the tragedy.
In a witness statement released on Thursday, crew manager Charles Batterbee said he was knocked down by burning debris and only saved by the riot shield he was carrying over his head.
His account of the way that flames erupted from flat 16, where the fire began, and ignited external cladding revealed his astonishment at the speed and ferocity of the fire.
“The noise was so loud with the fire, the constantly falling debris and the pumps going,” Batterbee said. “There were times during the night when I was far enough away carrying out a task, where I would be able to see the entirety of the tower and every time it was a hundred times worse than the time before.
“It shouldn’t have happened. It completely spread from being one face alight to eventually all faces alight. At one point, it looked like a massive line of fire had gone up and over the top of the building and down the west side. We had gone from a fire in a building to a building on fire.”
Batterbee, who was based at north Kensington fire station, had visited the tower the previous year as it was undergoing refurbishment. He told the inquiry it was a familiarisation visit.
He was worried about how he would plug in hoses because of work being done that temporarily restricted access to dry riser inlets. Asked whether he was concerned about the risk of rapid or abnormal fire spread, Batterbee said: “Never in a million years did I believe there would be sandwich panels [combustible insulation between sheets of metal] on a high-rise residential building. They are generally found on commercial premises or factories.”
Batterbee was among the first to enter flat 16 in the early hours of 14 June 2017. The inquiry was shown thermal images recorded on his team’s cameras as they entered.
They smashed down the front door and crawled forward, and it initially seemed relatively cool in the flat. However, Batterbee soon became aware of greater heat in the kitchen.
“I have never felt that level of heat before, either in training or operationally,” Batterbee said. “It felt like it had totally wrapped around me. The water we put in just turned to steam but I couldn’t see any glowing or flame.”
The firefighters eventually extinguished the fire in the flat but then noticed it had broken through the window. At first he thought flames had jumped a floor to the flat above.
Batterbee helped a colleague, Daniel Brown, climb on to a counter to try to extinguish the blaze. “I held on to him by his [breathing apparatus] set shoulder strap as he lent out the window on the fourth floor with the jet,” Batterbee said. “Brown started hitting it with the jet but it was having no effect. Eventually I received a message back via my personal radio saying that they were aware it was alight outside.
“I remember the intensity of the flame. I can only describe it as huge balls of flame falling down along with debris. It didn’t stop; it was violent. I thought the fire was jumping quick and the debris were windows falling and window frames. We kept hitting it with water but again it was having no bearing on the fire.”
Later, Batterbee said, another crew manager directed his attention “towards a casualty that was under a salvage sheet, who had jumped. He had been placed in the garage area … I think he was a black male but I could only see the top of his leg/hip/waist area … It didn’t matter where you looked, it was just horror.”
He was also told by a man that “there was a woman dangling a baby out of a window on the 11th floor”. He informed his superiors and sent a firefighter to investigate.
As the fire intensified, police officers lent firefighters riot shields to protect them as they entered and left the building. “Some casualties had towels on their faces, which were black from the smoke,” Batterbee said.
“Casualties of all ages were coming down, from infants to elderly. One of my colleagues had a female over his shoulder but he didn’t know where to take her. It felt like we were just in there by ourselves.”
At one stage leaving the tower, Batterbee said, he was “struck by a piece of debris but was saved by the riot shield I was holding. … Whatever hit me was large and heavy and still alight. The shield deflected it and it landed in front of me … I lost control of the shield and my footing. The next thing I remember after that was the sensation of something burning through my tunic.” He was drenched in water and did not sustain burns.
Daniel Brown, another firefighter from north Kensington fire station, said in his witness statement that he could see fire “creeping up” behind the cladding when he leant out of the window of flat 16 but he “could not get water underneath the panels covering the outside of the building”.
Brown said that in his 27-year career he had “never seen fear in the faces of firefighters as I saw that night”. He believed the fire had already ignited the building’s external cladding before his team entered flat 16. The window appeared to have simply dropped out of its frame.
Throughout the fire, Brown said he did not hear a fire alarm which is “incredibly unusual for a tower block fire”. Grenfell used to have a fully integrated fire alarm system, he recalled, but it was no longer there and there was no concierge. Issuing smoke hoods to residents might have helped them escape down smoke-logged staircases, Brown suggested.
Thorough building inspections used to be carried out by the fire brigade before safety certificates were issued. That process was privatised many years ago, he said, and building inspections were now cursory. “I remember one firefighter saying that eventually this change would lead to massive fires with a lot of people dying. Looking back, this is the result and he was right.”
Brown said he would never forget “seeing the amount of people standing at windows and the screams from trapped, desperate residents and feeling powerless to help them”.
The inquiry continues.
