175 London Fire Brigade: Week 5

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast

BBC

News

4.8 • 627 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week the Inquiry looked at how the London Fire Brigade (LFB) trained its Control Room staff to deal with emergency calls. Evidence was given by Scott Hayward, former LFB Principal Operations Manager, and Joanne Smith, the Senior Operations Manager in the Control Room on the night of the Grenfell fire. The Inquiry heard how leading up to Grenfell there were a series of failures to improve the training of Control Room staff, despite commitments to learn the lessons of a fatal fire in a tower block in 2009. Presenter: Tom Symonds; Producers: Sharon Hemans, May Cameron and Nathan Gower; Researcher: Ben Henderson; Studio Mix: Gareth Jones; Editor: Hugh Levinson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.1	Hello and welcome to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry podcast with me Tom Simons.
0:10.3	This week, the inquiry's focus moved to the control room of the London Fire Brigade.
0:15.3	In fact, there are two where control room officers sit surrounded by screens.
0:26.3	If you ever dial 999 in London about a fire, this is where your call will end up.
0:32.7	The officers here talk to callers, dispatch fire crews, and use a red phone to pass critical information to teams on the ground.
0:35.3	On the night of the Grenfell Tower fire, the brigade was operating from its backup control room in Stratford, East London.
0:42.9	The normal one was undergoing maintenance.
0:45.8	This week's evidence was all about how the control room officers do their jobs.
0:51.2	And we learnt that in the years before Grenfell, there were a series of failures to
0:56.0	improve their training, despite commitments to learn the lessons of a fatal fire in 2009.
1:03.0	We know they were overwhelmed by the Grenfell fire. It was by far the biggest they'd ever dealt
1:08.7	with. The first call to Stratford came in at 1254am from Baha'ilu Khabadi in the flat where the fire
1:17.0	broke out.
1:18.1	Fire Brigade?
1:19.5	Yeah, hello, hi.
1:20.5	In the fire, flat 16, Greenfield Power.
1:23.1	Sorry, a fire where?
1:25.3	Flat 16 Greenfield Tower.
1:27.7	Right, hang on. Flat 16 Greenfield Tower. Right, hang on.
1:29.2	Flat 16 Greenfield Tower.
1:30.8	Flat 16.
	...

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