When fire was first reported at King Cross station on the evening of November 18, 1987, it was not at first deemed serious. The lack of visible flames and relatively clean wood smoke produced lulled the emergency services into a false sense of security, especially as firemen 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. Some argued that the station below the fire did not need to be evacuated because "fires rarely burn downwards", citing that there was no fire damage below the starting point of the fire. Fires certainly can burn downwards; flame radiation can heat fuels in any direction including below the fire; falling embers and other burning objects and flammable liquids can spread fire downwards.
The fire started beneath the escalator, spread above it, then flashed over and filled the ticket hall with flames and smoke. Investigations later showed that a particular combination of draughts, caused by an eastbound train arriving at the station while 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), adding to the speed of the fire spreading. This wind was however found to be not enough to account for the flash over or the fire ferocity which was described as similar to a blowtorch.
While inspecting an undamaged escalator, forensic investigators found charred wood in 18 places beneath the up escalator, which showed that similar fires had started before but had burnt themselves out without spreading. All these combustion points were on the right hand side, which is where standing passengers are most likely to light a cigarette: passengers stand on the right to let walking passengers pass on the left. Smoking had been banned for two years there but investigators found this was generally ignored by commuters. The investigators found a large build-up of grease under the tracks, but it was believed it would be difficult to ignite and slow to burn once it started; however it was noted that the grease was heavily impregnated with paper fragments from discarded tickets, sweet wrappers, fluff from clothing, and human hair and rat hair; records showed the under stair tracks had not been cleaned since the escalator was constructed in the 1940s.
A test was conducted where lit matches were to be dropped on the escalator to see if this was the cause. With firemen standing by, the first match dropped ignited the grease and began spreading. This fire was allowed to burn for seven minutes, then extinguished without providing any evidence for why the fire flashed over although the fire replicated the initial eyewitness reports up to that point. The investigators next enlisted Oxford University to make a computer simulation of Kings Cross station. In the early stages of the modelled fire the flames lay down in the escalator rather than burning vertically and produced a jet of flame into the ticket hall. The end result matched the tube fire exactly.
In total, 31 people died 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. London Fire Brigade Station Officer Colin Townsley from A24 Soho was in charge of the first fire engine to arrive at the scene and was down in the station concourse at the time of the flashover. As he was making his exit, Townsley spotted a woman who was in trouble and stopped to help her. He was not wearing breathing apparatus and was overcome by the smoke. Although he was later found in the inferno by his colleagues, efforts to revive him had little effect, and he was rushed to hospital, where he later died due to smoke inhalation.
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