Hero firefighters who battled through intense heat desperate to rescue people offered counselling to help deal with trauma of what they saw
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Heroic firefighters who battled intense heat in the desperate rescue of people from the Grenfell Tower blaze will be offered counselling to help them cope with the trauma of what they saw.
Hundreds of London's firefighters battled through flames and thick smoke - many running up stairs as families fled - in a heroic attempt to save those trapped in their homes.
And fire commissioner Dany Cotton says the brave crews will be offered counselling to help them cope with the tragedy.
He said: "I’m more concerned longer term about the mental impact on a lot of people who were here, people saw and heard things on scale they have never seen before.
"Going forward one of my main concerns about my firefighters is about their mental well being , and about doing trauma and care counselling for them."
(Photo: EPA)
(Photo: Adam Gerrard/Daily Mirror)
She paid tribute to those who had battled the flames, saying: "Early on in the fire my firefighters battled through intense heat to reach some of the very higher floors. We were specifically targeting flats where we were getting calls where we knew where people were.
"It was a very stressful and difficult time. I was committing hundreds of firefighters into a building that to lot of people looked terribly unsafe. My firefighters were desperate to get in the and desperate to rescue people.
"We committed crew after crew into a very dangerous, very hot and very difficult situation, because we had a passion to do as much as we could to rescue the people in there. It was a very traumatic event for everyone involved."
Nine firefighters were injured in the blaze, including burns and heat exhaustion as debris collapsed on them.
(Photo: Rex Features)
(Photo: Getty Images Europe)
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One of the firefighters who battled the inferno made the devastating prediction that the death toll of 12 people is likely to rise.
He told LBC: “I only went as far as the 10th floor. What we saw, that [death] toll is going to rise. “No matter what plan you had to deal with that sort of fire, that plan was going to fall down.
"It was just like those images of 9/11. ‘The amount of kit that this job has absorbed from the London Fire Brigade is unbelievable. It’s like a warzone.”
Fire crews have carried out a "brief search" of the all 24 residential floors of the tower block but Ms Cotton said a more thorough search has been delayed because of concerns about the safety of the building.
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Speaking to BBC News she said: “On the upper floors there is still some very small pockets of fire remaining. Due to the nature of the building at the moment we are not sending firefighters in there, because it is not structurally safe for them to go right out to the edges of the building now.
"It will be a very difficult and painstaking process to systematically. There are still a number of floors that will require a thorough search for us to make sure there are no further people involved in this fire.
"However we do anticipate that on some of upper floors there may still be people involved in there."
The number of people missing following the fire as people could have been out of their homes or in rest centres or hospital and Ms Cotton dsaid a "painstaking fingertip search" would be carried out as soon as possible.
Admitting she had "never seen a fire like this in my career", Ms Cotton added: "The fire did spread very quickly. It is far too early to speculate about the cause of that. There will be a thorough investigation. Here and now we are still in the rescue phase."