Grenfell fireman claims crews lacked training to tackle blaze and says brigade 'could see this coming'

A Grenfell firefighter has become the first to break rank to criticise the response to disaster, saying that the London Fire Brigade “could see this coming”.

Of the 72 people who lost their lives in the blaze up to 55 had been told to “stay put” by the fire service, it has emerged.

But despite growing criticism of the advice the fire service has always defended its position, saying that they could not have predicted what would happen when the flames tore through the cladding.

Firefighters have apparently been banned from talking publicly about the night, but one fireman has now spoken out to criticise his bosses.

The man, whose identity has been protected, said that in his experience they had had no training to deal with high rise evacuations.

He told Channel 4’s Dispatches: “There is one line in one of the policies I believe that says consider mass evacuation. But there is no guidance on how to do it. Michael Dowden [Incident Commander on the night] didn’t have the toolkit to tackle that fire.

"He didn’t have the policies to say ‘right, no that’s it, I’ve lost this, get everyone out of the building’. How on Earth were we put in that position?”

The “stay put” policy was abandoned at 2.47am, nearly two hours after the fire began at 12.54am on June 14 2017.

Experts have told the public inquiry into the fire that it would have been possible to evacuate all the residents in as little as 7 minutes and it would been safe to do so until 2am when the building was engulfed.

Stay-put advice is based on the concept that a fire will remain contained inside the flat where it starts.

The fire brigade has been told by a Coroner to retrain incident commanders to anticipate compartment failure after a previous fire at Lakanal House tower block in 2009 which led to six deaths.

However, the brigade decided its existing training was sufficient.

Giving evidence to the inquiry last Autumn, Dany Cotton, the London Fire Commissioner, said: “I wouldn’t expect us to be developing training or a response to something that simply shouldn’t happen.”

But the response was criticised by the fireman, who said: “It really annoyed me straight afterwards because everyone was … ‘this fire is unprecedented’. We had a lot of that. I think that’s [the] narrative that they want you to think because that kind of suggests that no one’s responsible.

“But the warning signs were there. We could have learnt these lessons. The stuff that the Coroner recommended from Lakanal House would have given Michael the tools he needed to recognise that that building was not acting how it should have acted. We could see this coming.”

The London Fire Brigade said in a statement: “Our thoughts are with the Grenfell community. It’s essential to understand what happened on the night.

“We are listening, we are learning and already making changes. We all need to learn about the cause and response to the fire to prevent such an incident happening again.

“We strongly believe drawing conclusions before the public inquiry, police investigation and our own investigation, could be prejudicial, which is why we could not take part in this programme.

“Our staff acted on what they faced that night and not on what we have learnt subsequently about why and how the fire spread with such devastating consequences."

Grenfell: Did The Fire Brigade Fail? will be shown on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday 18 February.