I missed the fire by about an hour. I’d travelled to London from Leeds with a colleague and we had intended to have a quick pint before getting the train back.

I missed the fire by about an hour. I’d travelled to London from Leeds with a colleague and we had intended to have a quick pint before getting the train back. He felt unwell during the day so we returned early, luckily as it happened. As said elsewhere, in 1987, in the days before ubiquitous mobile phones, my wife had no way of contacting me to find out whether I was caught up in the big news story of the day (31 people died). Later on, I became professionally interested in risk management, reading classics such as Normal Accidents [0]. I also tracked down the Fennel report [pdf, 1] written during the inquest. I used the fire as a case study at work to raise awareness of the dangers of the normalisation of deviance. The London underground turned out to have been a fire disaster waiting to happen. To quote Fennel: “London Underground did not guard against the unpredictability of fire. Since no one had been killed in the earlier fires they genuinely believed that with passengers and staff acting as fire detectors there would be sufficient time to evacuate passengers safely. But they had no system to train staff in fire drill or evacuation and their attitude towards fire (which they insisted should be called 'smouldering' and regarded as an occupational hazard) gave the staff a false sense of security. They failed to appreciate the particular problems of smoke.” Fennel reports that there were a staggering 400 fires and ‘smoulders’ between 1958 and 1987. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents [1] http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/DoT_KX1987.pdf http://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/documents/DoT_KX1987.pdf