Ricky Nuttall ex firefighter who attended the tragic grenfell tower fire & SAS WDW contestant

The team went to bed at around midnight. Not long afterwards, in the early hours, they were awoken and alerted to an incident. As a firefighter, Ricky was well used to having to get ready quickly, going from "being asleep in your pants to being fully rigged and driving a fire engine" in the space of around 60 seconds.By the time he got to the watch room, Ricky realised it would be a tough job ahead of them. The slip was still printing due to the amount of resources required to extinguish the massive blaze that awaited them. Ricky told The Mirror: "We knew from that point it was a big job. It was actually a working fire. And it was going to be a long night."With no time left to lose, the firefighters swooped across North Kensington to a 24-storey '60s era tower block, built to house around 600 people. The name of the looming Brutalist building was Grenfell Tower.Looking back on his earliest impressions of the now infamous scene, Ricky, 44, recalled: "It was obvious from the outset, from arrival, that the building wasn't reacting as it should do to the fire. It was a very dynamic incident in every sense. So, it was a chaotic scene at the start, but it was what I always refer to as organised chaos. Everyone had their job. Everyone knew what they were doing, but everyone was running somewhere."In the chaos that ensued, Ricky witnessed people being pulled from the burning building, bits of which were falling down all around. At one point, one of the fire engines was very nearly caught alight after a smouldering piece of debris landed on it. He remembers he and his colleague being "in a sort of queue to go into the tower", getting their first briefing. The harrowing scenes that unfolded from that point onwards made it clear that this was no ordinary fire.Ricky shared: "To get a sense of the situation, when we first arrived and we're standing in the lobby area, one of the first things I saw were three firefighters carrying out two girls who looked around between sort of 11 and 14, I would guess."And they were on their backs, limp, unconscious, not breathing, with black soot coming out the corners of their mouths and black soot coming out their nostrils. Not alive. And as the first two firefighters carried the girls past us, the third firefighter made eye contact with me randomly, and he just stopped and said to me: "Be careful in there."Ricky is now a mental health advocate and speaks out about supporting mental health for veterans and emergency services.#veteran #podcast #firefighter #grenfelltower #sas #whodareswins #mentalhealthawareness #mentalhealthmatters #viral #shorts