Recalling the Station Hill fire rescue one year on

Acrid, thick, black smoke was billowing across the blue sky on a clear autumn morning in Reading.

I remember seeing it from the roof of Broad Street Mall where I'd parked up to report on another story.

The Station Hill development - a 16-storey office building being constructed in the heart of the town - was on fire.

I snapped a photo before racing down the car park stairs. It was 11:39 GMT on 23 November 2023 and the first call to the fire service had been made just one minute before. There were no sirens yet. It was eerily quiet.

Now at street-level, I used the smoke crawling over the top of the buildings as a guide to find the smouldering high-rise.

On Friar Street, police were managing a crowd that had gathered at the entrance of an alleyway with a view of the fire. Workers from offices, cafes and shops spilled out onto the street as the area was evacuated.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to get people to talk to you when you are holding a microphone - but this was not one of those days.

Wide-eyed witnesses told me how their normal mornings had been punctured by this event, which seemed straight out of a Hollywood film.

We all looked up at the scar the fire had left on the building. It had burned ferociously but briefly. Under the warped and charred glass about ten storeys above, the crowd hummed with adrenaline.

I was soon live on BBC Radio Berkshire, describing what I’d seen and what people in the crowd had recounted.

Workers in a construction crew who had been in the building told me they did not think anyone had been seriously hurt.

And then I met Peter, who ran a cafe in the shadow of the block that had caught fire.

He stumbled on his words as he recounted seeing the blaze - and then he showed me a video he'd taken on his phone.

It showed a person being lifted by a crane from the roof of a building, just several feet from the flames.

The crane's winch swung in. The crowd gasped as the worker awkwardly tried to get into the cage, and then cheered as they watched the worker pulled away from certain death.

It became the defining image of the day.

Months later I meet Glen Edwards, the hero at the controls of the crane.

He told me that it was not until he got down to the ground and was met with applause from onlookers that he really realised what he’d achieved that day.

“I was only doing my job” he told me.

“I was the one in the crane, it could have been a hundred other crane drivers, I just happened to be there that day”.

Glen spoke to the man he had rescued for the first time in August. I was told the brief phone call consisted mostly of the phrase "thank you".

Two people ended up in hospital with smoke inhalation, but neither were thought to be serious cases, South Central Ambulance Service told us.

The town centre ground to a halt that afternoon. Firefighters and police officers remained on the scene for hours.

One year on, it is still not known how the blaze began. The investigation, run by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), is still ongoing.

And while the fire itself felt like it was over in a flash, it's not a day the people of Reading will be forgetting any time soon.

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