King's Cross fire

The King's Cross St. Pancras tube station fire was a fatal fire on the London Underground. It broke out at approximately 19:30 (7:30 PM) on 18 November 1987, and killed 31 people.
It took place at King's Cross St. Pancras station, a major interchange on the London Underground. The station consisted of two parts (it has subsequently been expanded), a subsurface station on the Circle, Hammersmith & City, and Metropolitan Lines (Note: at the time of the incident, the Hammersmith & City line was considered part of the Metropolitan line) and a deep-level tube station for the Northern, Piccadilly, and Victoria Lines. The fire started in an escalator shaft serving the Piccadilly Line, which was burnt out along with the top level (entrances and ticket hall) of the deep-level tube station.

Emergency services at King's Cross

The intensity of the fire was initially inexplicable and the forensic investigation resulted in the discovery of a new fluid flow phenomenon that was completely unknown to the scientific community at the time. The subsequent public inquiry led to the introduction of new fire safety regulations.

Cause

The escalator on which the fire started had been built just before World War II. The steps and sides of the escalator were partly made of wood, which meant that they burned quickly and easily. Although smoking was banned on the subsurface sections of the London Underground in February 1985 (a consequence of the Oxford Circus fire that happened that year), the fire was most probably caused by a traveller discarding a burning match, which fell down the side of the escalator onto the running track (Fennell 1988, p. 111). The running track had not been cleaned since the escalator was constructed in the 1940s and was covered in grease and fibrous detritus that had built up over the years.
Other possible causes such as arson and an IRA bomb were quickly rejected by police as possible causes of the fire because of the lack of damage to the metal sides of the escalator that would have been present in the event of a bomb, or of significant traces of an accelerant as would be expected in an arson.

How the fire spread

Wooden escalators at Greenford tube station, similar to those that caught fire at King's Cross. Situated on an open-air platform, these are the only wooden escalators still in service on the London Underground.

The lack of visible flames and relatively clean wood smoke produced lulled the emergency services into a false sense of security, especially as the fire brigades had attended more than 400 similar tube fires over the previous three decades. Firemen later described the fire as around the size and intensity of a campfire. Many people in the ticket hall believed that the fire was small and thus not an immediate hazard: indeed, an evacuation route from the tunnels below was arranged through a parallel escalator tunnel to the ticket hall above the burning escalator. Station staff claimed that the station below the fire did not need to be evacuated because of a belief that "fires rarely burn downwards", saying that there was no fire damage below the starting point of the fire. On the other hand, another consideration is ventilation; a fire being above does not mean that smoke and other products of incomplete combustion, including carbon monoxide, will not spread downwards. Alterations to normal ventilation flows are particularly common in underground environments, including tube stations.
The fire started beneath the escalator, spread above it, then flashed over and filled the ticket hall with flames and dense smoke. Investigations later showed that a particular combination of draughts, caused by an eastbound train arriving at the station at the same time that a westbound train was leaving, created a 12 mph wind through the station and up the escalator (known as the piston effect; this helps ventilate the tube), increasing the speed at which the fire spread. This wind was however found to be not enough to account for the flashover or the fire's intense ferocity, which was described as similar to a blowtorch.

Emergency response

The London Fire Brigade initially despatched four fire appliances and a turntable ladder, with units from A24 Soho Fire Station being the first on the scene at 19:42, followed shortly by colleagues from C27 Clerkenwell, A22 Manchester Square and A23 Euston. More than 30 fire crews - over 150 firefighters - were eventually deployed to combat the incident.
A total of 14 ambulances from the London Ambulance Service fleet ferried the injured to local hospitals including University College Hospital.
The fire was officially declared extinguished at 01:46 the following day (19 November), although emergency crews remained at the scene until 18:20.

Victims

In total, 31 people were killed and more than 60 received injuries ranging from severe burns to smoke inhalation. The fatalities were among those unable to escape from the ticket hall before succumbing to the effects of the latter stages of thick smoke and the intense heat.