Grenfell Tower fire: Police reveal painstaking task of identifying human remains in block

'Sieves go down to 6mm so that we guarantee we can pick up small fragments of bone, teeth and any identifiable part of the body we can pick up at that stage'

The police sergeant leading the operation to recover the deceased at Grenfell Tower has told of the painstaking process of identifying human remains one month on from the devastating fire.

Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) coordinator Sgt Alistair Hutchins said officers were facing huge emotional pressures due to the scale of the tragedy that claimed at least 80 lives.

Sgt Hutchins said 24 search-trained officers were working in the building, along with six archaeologists, conducting fingertip searches of every flat in the 24-storey block to locate any small fragments of bone, teeth or body parts that could later be identified.

“The pressure it puts on you emotionally is huge. The DVI team are all volunteers and to ask them to enter a building like this and deal with the stuff they are finding is a big task for them,” he said.

“It’s probably the worst incident that I have ever dealt with and I have been doing DVI for 18 years. I have dealt with many incidents and I have never come across one harder both emotionally, physically and challenging.”

Sgt Hutchins said teams first entered the building on 14 June while the fire was still raging on some of the upper floors.

“Our job was to form a tactical plan – so where the deceased were, visibly, so we can then plan a recovery strategy and that included animals because people’s pets were in there as well,” he said.

“No lights so we had to use head torches. Hoses everywhere. Fire equipment everywhere with firefighters still fighting fires up higher, smoke conditions, the heat, water pouring down the stairwells – if you imagine walking through a waterfall it will give you an idea, with the waterfall being hot - those are the conditions we were working through initially.”

Teams then brought in dogs to identify search areas, before using small trowels and shovels to sift through the tonnes of rubble on each floor.

“The sieves go down to 6mm so that we guarantee we can pick up small fragments of bone, teeth and any identifiable part of the human body we can pick up at that stage,” he said.

“All the debris from that flat is than packaged and is kept to one side and is marked with the floor number and the flat number so we can identify those bags. Then once we have cleared that flat, we then move on to the next flat and the process is repeated again until we have cleared every single flat in this tower block.”

It comes after London fire chief Dany Cotton said only a miracle would have stopped the inferno raging at the west London block amid claims firefighters were sent to the scene without the correct equipment.

Firefighters did "the very best" they could on the night and many are suffering following the horrors they witnessed while tackling the blaze, she said.

"People have come out with all different kinds of suggestions and there's all sorts of experts around. I think people need to let the inquiry play out. But from everything I've seen from a professional firefighter, I believe we did the very best we could on that night," she said.

"I have lots of people who are suffering and will suffer in the future from things that happened that evening," she said.

Police revealed the number of people suspected to be inside the building for the first time on Monday.

More than 250 Grenfell Tower residents survived the devastating fire that killed at least 80 people last month, according to police.

Police said investigations had led them to conclude 350 people lived in the west London tower but 14 were not there when the building went up in flames.

Authorities believe 255 people escaped and 80 are still estimated to have died or are missing.

Thirty-two victims have been positively identified, with 55 postmortem examinations having taken place, according to investigating officers speaking at a briefing on Monday.

Detectives said that due to the damage caused by the fire, some bodies may never be identified.

But police said they do not expect the death toll to rise much further.

Families of victims were told at a meeting with coroner Fiona Wilcox and the Met Police earlier in the month that their relatives may not be identified until the end of the year.

Sgt Hutchins said it was “unknown to a degree” how long the recovery process would take but said teams were working on a rough estimate of four months.