Grenfell Inquiry day 29: fire service ‘overwhelmed’ by survival guidance calls

A firefighter involved with co-ordinating 999 calls at Grenfell Tower spoke today of being “overwhelmed” by the sheer number of people seeking help.

Paul Sadler, a watch manager at Lambeth, arrived at the scene when 25 fire engines had been deployed.

He told the inquiry today that when he arrived the fire was “something I’d never seen before”.

He was charged with handling 999 calls, known as fire survival guidance (FSG) calls, and passing on information to fire officers on the ground.

“The rate they were coming in was phenomenal I could not write them down quick enough,” he told the inquiry today. The calls were coming from people in flats, on floors and some people on the roof of the 24-storey block,” he said.

At one point he said the calls felt “relentless” as they coming in every 20 seconds as he was writing out FSG forms.

Much of the evidence this week at the inquiry has focused on the rescue efforts of firefighters and the chaotic communication between fire brigade staff as the scale of the tragedy unfolded.

Mr Sadler was initially handed an envelope with details written down of the flats and the floor number where distress calls had been received. He was forced to work off a car bonnet and had members of the public coming up to him with loved ones in the tower.

Later, he went onto the streets around Grenfell Tower to get information from members of the public on missing persons.

“I spoke to a few of the police officers there [at Latimer Road station] and then basically we shouted to the crowd to come forward if they had been in the tower and did they know of anybody that was missing,” he wrote in his evidence. “I did this in about three different locations in the area around the tube station. My first location was on Bramley Road in front of the Garden Bar and Grill.

“The police officer shouted out and quite a few groups came forward. More were asking about friends and family missing, however only two or three groups told me they had been in the tower at the time of the fire, but they had not called LFB [London Fire Brigade] creating an FSG.”

In the conclusion of his written evidence, Mr Sadler called for “greater FSG resources for an incident of this level” which he said would be helped by “appropriate finances”.