eventually passed word to the fire department. At 7:36 p.m.-twenty-two minutes after Brickell was alerted to the flaming tissue-the fire brigade received a call: “Small fire at King’s Cross.” Commuters were pushing past the policeman as he stood outside, speaking on his radio. They were rushing into the station, down into the tunnels, focused on getting home for dinner.
Within minutes, many of them would be dead.
At 7:36 P.M., an Underground worker roped off entry to the Piccadilly escalator and another started diverting people to a different stairway. New trains were arriving every few minutes. The platforms where passengers exited subway cars were crowded. A bottleneck started building at the bottom of an open staircase.
Hayes, the safety inspector, went into a passageway that led to the Piccadilly escalator’s machine room. In the dark, there was a set of controls for a sprinkler system specifically designed to fight fires on escalators. It had been installed years earlier, after a fire in another station had led to a series of dire reports about the risks of a sudden blaze. More than two dozen studies and reprimands had said that the Underground was unprepared for fires, and that staff needed to be trained in how to use sprinklers and fire extinguishers, which were positioned on every train platform. Two years earlier the deputy assistant chief of the London Fire Brigade had written to the operations director for railways, complaining about subway workers’ safety habits.
“I am gravely concerned,” the letter read. “I cannot urge too strongly that… clear instructions be given that on any suspicion of fire, the Fire Brigade be called without delay. This could save lives.”
However, Hayes, the safety inspector, never saw that letter because it was sent to a separate division from the one he worked within, and the Underground’s policies were never rewritten to reflect the warning. No one inside King’s Cross understood how to use the escalator sprinkler system or was authorized to use the extinguishers, because another department controlled them. Hayes completely forgot the sprinkler system existed. The truces ruling the Underground made sure everyone knew their place, but they left no room for learning about anything outside what you were assigned to know. Hayes ran past the sprinkler controls without so much as a glance.
When he reached the machine room, he was nearly overcome by heat. The fire was already too big to fight. He ran back to the main hall. There was a line of people standing at the ticket machines and hundreds of people milling about the room, walking to platforms or leaving the station. Hayes found a policeman.
“We’ve got to stop the trains and get everyone out of here,” he told him. “The fire is out of control. It’s going everywhere.”
At 7:42 P.M.-almost a half hour after the burning tissue-the first fireman arrived at King’s Cross. As he entered the ticketing hall he saw dense black smoke starting to snake along the ceiling. The escalator’s rubber handrails had begun to burn. As the acrid smell of burning rubber spread, commuters in the ticketing hall began to recognize that something was wrong. They moved toward the exits as firemen waded through the crowd, fighting against the tide.
Below, the fire was spreading. The entire escalator was now aflame, producing a superheated gas that rose to the top of the shaft enclosing the escalator, where it was trapped against the tunnel’s ceiling, which was covered with about twenty layers of old paint. A few years earlier, the Underground’s director of operations had suggested that all this paint might pose a fire hazard. Perhaps, he said, the old layers should be removed before a new one is applied?
Painting protocols were not in his purview, however. Paint responsibility resided with the maintenance department, whose chief politely thanked his colleague for the recommendation, and then noted that if he wanted to interfere with other departments, the favor would be swiftly returned.
The director of operations withdrew his recommendation.
As the superheated gases pooled along the ceiling of the escalator shaft, all those old layers of paint began absorbing the warmth. As each new train arrived, it pushed a fresh gust of oxygen into the station, feeding the fire like a bellows.
At 7:43 P.M., a train arrived and a salesman named Mark Silver exited. He knew immediately that something was wrong. The air was hazy, the platform packed with people. Smoke wafted around where he was standing, curling around the train cars as they sat on the tracks. He turned to reenter the train, but the doors had closed. He hammered on the windows, but there was an unofficial policy to avoid tardiness: Once the doors were sealed, they did not open again. Up and down the platform, Silver and other passengers screamed at the driver to open the doors. The signal light changed to green, and the train pulled away. One woman jumped on the tracks, running after the train as it moved into the tunnel. “Let me in!” she screamed.
Silver walked down the platform, to where a policeman was directing everyone away from the Piccadilly escalator and to another stairway. There were crowds of panicked people waiting to get upstairs. They could all smell the smoke, and everyone was packed together. It felt hot-either from the fire or the crush of people, Silver wasn’t sure. He finally got to the bottom of an escalator that had been turned off. As he climbed toward the ticketing hall, he could feel his legs burning from heat coming through a fifteen-foot wall separating him from the Piccadilly shaft. “I looked up and saw the walls and ceiling sizzling,” he later said.
At 7:45 P.M., an arriving train forced a large gust of air into the station. As the oxygen fed the fire, the blaze in the Piccadilly escalator roared. The superheated gases along the ceiling of the shaft, fueled by fire below and sizzling paint above, reached a combustion temperature, known as a “flashover point.” At that moment, everything inside the shaft-the paint, the wooden escalator stairs, and any other available fuel-ignited in a fiery blast. The force of the sudden incineration acted the explosion of gunpowder at the base of a rifle barrel. It began pushing the fire upward through the long shaft, absorbing more heat and velocity as the blaze expanded until it shot out of the tunnel and into the ticketing hall in a wall of flames that set metal, tile, and flesh on fire. The temperature inside the hall shot up 150 degrees in half a second. A policeman riding one of the side escalators later told investigators that he saw “a jet of flame that shot up and then collected into a kind of ball.” There were nearly fifty people inside the hall at the time.
Aboveground, on the street, a passerby felt heat explode from one of the subway’s exits, saw a passenger stagger out, and ran to help. “I got hold of his right hand with my right hand but as our hands touched I could feel his was red hot and some of the skin came off in my hand,” the rescuer said. A policeman who was entering the ticketing hall as the explosion occurred later told reporters, from a hospital bed, that “a fireball hit me in the face and knocked me off my feet. My hands caught fire. They were just melting.”
He was one of the last people to exit the hall alive.
Shortly after the explosion, dozens of fire trucks arrived. But because the fire department’s rules instructed them to connect their hoses to street-level hydrants, rather than those installed by the Underground inside the station, and because none of the subway employees had blueprints showing the station’s layout-all the plans were in an office that was locked, and none of the ticketing agents or the station manager had keys-it took hours to extinguish the flames.
When the blaze was finally put out at 1:46 A.M.-six hours after the burning tissue was noticed-the toll stood at thirty-one dead and dozens injured.
“Why did they send me straight into the fire?” a twenty-year-old music teacher asked the next day from a hospital bed. “I could see them burning. I could hear them screaming. Why didn’t someone take charge?” [181]
To answer those questions, consider a few of the truces the London Underground relied upon to function:
Ticketing clerks were warned that their jurisdiction was strictly limited to selling tickets, so if they saw a burning tissue, they didn’t warn anyone for fear of overstepping their bounds.
Station employees weren’t trained how to use the sprinkler system or extinguishers, because that equipment was overseen by a different division.
The station’s safety inspector never saw a letter from the London Fire Brigade warning about fire risks because it was sent to the operations director, and information like that wasn’t shared across divisions.
Employees were instructed only to contact the fire brigade as a last resort, so as not to panic commuters unnecessarily.
The fire brigade insisted on using its own street-level hydrants, ignoring pipes in the ticketing hall that could have delivered water, because they had been ordered not to use equipment installed by other agencies.
In some ways, each of these informal rules, on its own, makes a certain amount of sense. For instance, the habits that kept ticketing clerks focused on selling tickets instead of doing anything else-including keeping an eye
