I Lost Two Colleagues In A High-rise Fire But I Still Had A Job To Do

I was at home when I got the call in the early hours of the morning of 2 February 2005. “We’ve lost two officers,” were the first words Hertfordshire’s assistant chief fire officer told me that night.

On the face of it, this had been a routine call-out to a high-rise flat fire. I asked him to clarify what he meant.

“Two officers have died in the fire at Harrow Court,” he said. I was in total shock. I couldn’t understand how this could have happened. But I was also the deputy chief fire officer at the time and knew I needed to get down to the scene to help and support the teams there. I had been unable to get through to the chief on my way.

Although firefighters do occasionally come to harm, nothing can prepare you for the shock of losing your colleagues, and it’s something that touches everyone involved at the time.

The fire was mainly out by the time I arrived in the early morning, but there was lots to be done.

I knew I would need to preserve any evidence for an investigation so one of the first things I did that morning was to ring my old service, the London Fire Brigade, to call in extra help from their accident and investigation resources.

Of course, after a tragedy like this your thoughts are with the families of the firefighters who died – someone would have the difficult job of informing them.

I was also very concerned about the welfare of the other firefighters that were there who had suffered trauma. The initial crews were taken to our training centre to begin to debrief and make sure everyone was OK. The crew was on their first night duty of the week. They only had one more to go before a few days off.

I wanted to know they were OK, and of course, my emotions were affected. But there was still a job to do. And there were decisions to be made.

There were countless residents that had been evacuated and needed to be looked after and had nowhere to go.

I had to think about who was going to recover the bodies. Who was going to volunteer to do that? To recover the bodies of your colleagues is really tough to do. In the end, firefighters volunteered and Jeff and Michael were carried out of the tower in the late morning.

Hertfordshire’s chief fire officer at the time was only six weeks from retirement. When we got hold of him, he was in such deep shock that I felt a heavy responsibility to look after him as well. He had gone through a 30-year career and in his last six weeks, he had lost two people in his service. So I took care of all the media and coordinating the investigation, because he was just unable to process it. It didn’t take him long to get back on his feet but those first few hours were tough.

In the immediate aftermath, I also had to think about staffing and finding replacements for some of the officers who, understandably, couldn’t face doing a shift the next day. We still needed to serve the public of Hertfordshire, and cruelly after a tragedy like this, life goes on. We couldn’t stop attending fires and road traffic collisions – even as we mourned and tried to cope with what happened.

We made sure our teams had counselling at the time, and there was an awareness of PTSD, but not like we have now. Considering it was 14 years ago, I’m proud of the support we were able to provide. But now, we have a much greater awareness of mental health and wellbeing in the fire and rescue service.