8 January 1991: One dead as train
crashes into buffers
One person has died and hundreds have been injured in a train crash
at Cannon Street station in London.
The accident happened at 0844 GMT today as the 0758 commuter train from Sevenoaks in Kent,
was pulling into the station, which is in the heart of the city's financial district.
It is understood the brakes on the train, which was travelling at no more than five miles
(eight kilometres) per hour, may have failed.
Fifteen people were trapped inside the train after the sixth carriage of the 10-carriage
train, which was carrying 1,000 passengers, was pushed on top of the fifth by the impact
of the crash.
More than 80 fire-fighters, 100 ambulance crew and 11 doctors were on the scene within
minutes.
'Tangled wreck'
One man, believed to be in his 20s, was cut free from the wreckage with head and abdominal
injuries but died on his way to hospital after suffering a heart attack.
Dozens were transported to the nearby St Bartholomew's, Guy's and London hospitals. The
worst-injured were airlifted by helicopter.
Paramedic Peter Westwood said: "It was a real mess, just a tangled wreck where the
two carriages came together.
"It was a pretty horrific sight, believe me."
Transport Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, who was in Scotland at the time of the crash, flew
straight to the scene of the accident.
Dr Kenneth Hines, London unit co-ordinator of the British Association for Immediate Care
(Basics), who was one of the first on the scene, said: "It was organised chaos. A
large number of people with many injuries were removed rapidly. Most of the casualties had
limb and compression injuries. "
Passengers on the train who were relatively unscathed spoke about the accident.
Denise Farrelly, aged 20, from Forest Hill, south London, said: "I just remember the
lights going out and seats being thrown up in the air, the train seemed a bit fast, a lot
were ready to get off and one man had already opened the door when there was a massive
bang.
"People were smashing into each other and one woman had her leg jammed between two
seats."
Christina Gale, 38, a personal assistant from Grove Park, south-east London, said:
"Everything went silent, I was trapped between two people. There was a woman beside
me and she was bleeding.
"My seat landed on top of me. There was a man thrown in front of me, he had been
sitting four rows back."
Questions are now being asked about the safety of British Rail's ageing rolling stock and
whether low investment in the railways is to blame.
Jimmy Knapp, General Secretary of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport
Workers, said: "We want to know why this train failed to stop and also why it failed
to withstand an impact at low speed."
A BR spokesperson said: "Normal procedure is for drivers to pull up about 10 feet
(three metres) short of the buffers. What we will have to find out is whether the driver
was in full control of the train, whether he was incapacitated, or whether there was
something wrong with the train."
In Context
It later emerged that 542 people had been injured in the crash.
Rescue workers took five hours to cut 15 passengers from the wreckage
The dead man was named as 24-year-old computer programmer, Martin Strivens, from Orpington
in Kent.
A second person, 59-year-old Patricia McCay, from Forest Hill in south London, died three
days after the accident from injuries sustained in the crash.
The official report into the crash published by the Health and Safety Executive the
following September blamed driver error and ageing rolling stock.
The driver, Maurice Graham, 25, was found to have traces of cannabis in his blood in a
drugs test conducted three days after the crash but the inquiry found there was
insufficient evidence to suggest this had caused the accident.
The report did say, however, that no defect had been found with the braking or tracking
systems on the train and that Mr Graham had therefore "failed to brake
properly".
A total of 15 recommendations were made in the report to help prevent or reduce the
consequences of buffer-stop collisions at stations.
These included driver training, the introduction of automatic train protection technology,
mandatory drug and alcohol tests on train drivers, the installation of "black
box" data recorders and the withdrawal of all old rolling stock.
In 1991, the Cannon Street rail crash led to the introduction of the
Transport and Works Act 1992, which made it a criminal act for transport workers to be
unfit because of drink and drugs |
