Daniel Egan tells inquiry that it was obvious everybody needed to get out, not stay put

Senior fire officers responding to the Grenfell Tower blaze wanted the building to be evacuated well before the decision was finally made, the public inquiry into the disaster which claimed 72 lives has heard.

Dan Egan, a senior fire safety officer with 25 years’ experience, said he believed the tower should have been evacuated when he arrived just before 2am on 14 June 2017. He said station manager Pete Wolfenden and group manager Tom Goodall, senior firefighters overseeing the response, agreed.

The policy telling residents to stay put had been based on the tower’s design, which was intended to limit fires to individual flats. But the flames spread quickly, jumping 19 floors in 12 minutes through the combustible cladding although the stay-put strategy was only changed to evacuation at 2.47am.

Concern was so great the guidance was wrong that the watch manager in charge of taking 999 calls from residents at the control room in Stratford in east London also called, asking if they could change the stay-put policy, Egan said.

“It looked like a film, people were shouting and screaming, they were panicking and wanting people to help,” he said during an emotionally draining testimony. “My first thoughts were that we needed to get everybody out. I could hear the roar of the fire. It was obvious … you could hear people screaming … it was just so obvious, sorry.”

Egan was responsible for channelling information coming from 999 calls from people inside the tower to the firefighters tasked with entering in breathing apparatus. He was frustrated that more of his colleagues had not been sent in and described a “heated discussion” between senior firefighters in the base of the tower over the pace of deployments.

A crew manager handled a phone call from a woman in the tower who said that one of her children was dead, the other was dying and that “she just wanted to die”.

Egan said he got her flat number but saw it had already been marked as a priority for firefighters to enter.

“I knew that I had passed on that information ages ago and it had been marked up to show BA [firefighters in breathing apparatus],” he said. “I knew this flat number had kept coming up and I had made sure that the information was getting through. But the lady on the phone was still in the flat.”

Egan said he chose to ignore the stay-put policy and advised members of the public at the base of the tower who were on the phone to people in the flats to tell them to get out.

“I was doing what I felt right,” Egan said.

In signs of conflicting strategies and a lack of communication, the inquiry heard that firefighters were being sent in to evacuate people whose lives were at risk at the same time as other residents were being told to stay put.

Firefighter Justin O’Beirne described how he directed two colleagues to the 16th floor to try to rescue Joseph Daniels, a bed-bound 69-year-old with dementia. They had been alerted by his son, Samuel Daniels, who was leaving the building by the single smoke-logged staircase but could not get his father to come with him. The two firefighters were unable to rescue him because the heat and smoke was so intense, O’Beirne told the inquiry. Daniels died in his flat.

O’Beirne described how he logged the details of firefighters in breathing apparatus who went up the burning building to try to save people in specific flats, including Debbie Lamprell in flat 161 on floor 19, Raymond Bernard in flat 201 and Saber Neda in flat 205 on the 23rd floor, all of whom died.

O’Beirne was the highest firefighter in the building when he was on the 12th floor and he saw a woman coming out suffering from smoke inhalation. There was thick black smoke with “absolutely zero” visibility but he did not radio down to the incident commander, Michael Dowden, or radio down for firefighters in breathing apparatus to come up urgently, the inquiry heard.

Asked about whether he thought the fire was spreading upwards and the stay-put policy was now in question, he said: “That was the feeling I was getting.”

“Did you have any thoughts along the lines of well now we need a strategy in order to rescue and remove all the occupants of the flats above level 12?” asked Richard Millett QC, counsel to the inquiry.

“I would say that decision would be for someone above my rank to clear the rest of the building,” O’Beirne replied.

When the stay-put policy was changed to evacuation, O’Beirne said senior officer Patrick Goulbourne told him to get all the firefighters out of the building. “He came up to me and said ‘get everyone out. Radio it from me and get everyone out now’.”

The inquiry continues.