Mr Stefan Krolak, a survivor from Bradford, said he saw the smoke start a few seats away from him 'The smoke seemed suddenly to set on fire. He was completely on fire and it looked as though he simply did not know what had happened to him.' One man in tears said: 'He looked as if he was just going for a stroll. People pushed him to the ground and tried to smother the flames.
One elderly man started to walk across the pitch with his clothes and face ablaze. The heat inside the stand literally ignited people where they stood. People were clambering over the wall on to the ground with their clothes and hair on fire. The flames suddenly appeared and the whole roof took alight,' he said. I ran to the stand and tried to help people escape. He saw smoke coming from a small area of the stand and thought that someone had let off a flare. Superintendent Barry Osborne, divisional commander for the football club area, who was injured in the fire said that many policemen cried when they saw how badly people had been burned. 'The fire just spread along the length of the stand in seconds. The chairman of the football club, Mr Stafford Heginbotham, was near to tears as he explained what had happened. The extinguishers were put there so that they would be out of the way of fans who could use them as missiles, which apparently had happened previously. The only fire extinguishers in the ground were in the clubroom, which is also in the main stand. They were not able to use water on the stand immediately because this would have hampered attempts to rescue people being dragged by the police and friends from the stand. The firemen who arrived there were met by a wall of flame and dense black smoke. It took the firemen four minutes to arrive at the ground but the speed of the fire was such that the blaze also took only four minutes to grip the entire stand. Some of the dead were found at the bottom of these steps.Ī call was made on a police radio to the police operations room in Bradford and relayed to the fire brigade at 3.43 pm. But the sheer density of numbers coupled with the thick, choking smoke made people collapse. Others ran forward to try to clamber over a fence and a small wall on to the pitch. Some people seem to have run back up the slope, thinking that they could get back through the turnstiles, and were burned alive. When the game began there was no way out for them, except by going on to the pitch. People had walked through turnstiles and along a wooden corridor before descending the steps into their seats. The stand slopes downwards from the South Parade. They were hampered further by the fact that doors at the back of the stand were locked to try to stop people coming in without paying. More than 3,500 people were crammed into the main stand area and this prevented people from moving away from the blaze quickly. The fire brigade said that when heat builds up so quickly it can cause flames to move much quicker than people can walk. The stand itself was engulfed in seconds, almost as if petrol had been ignited throughout the block. Below the seats were rows of litter which had piled up throughout the season, said witnesses. Then flames licked the underside of the seats, which were a combination of wood and plastic. Smoke was seen coming from the third row in the section but people are apparently used to seeing smoke flares on the Bradford ground. It is not thought that there was any crowd trouble in this section but one theory the police are investigating is that a flare or smoke-bomb was thrown or was accidentally dropped. There was some kind of disturbance near the edge of a block of seats in the G section of the main stand. It is impossible so far to be accurate about the precise cause of the fire, with grossly conflicting reports from witnesses. Soon they were all running for their lives.ĭisaster struck at 3.43 pm. Ironically, off-duty firemen were at the ground selling raffle tickets for a charity football match which should have been held yesterday. The match, Bradford against Lincoln, was to have been a joyous climax to the club winning the Third Division championship and being promoted to the Second Division.īradford city council officials, off-duty policemen and guests from Bradford 's twin town, Munchengladbach, were there to celebrate. Parents and children were laughing and joking with the police as the preliminaries to the game began. Saturday began for the fans in a carnival atmosphere at Bradford 's Valley Parade ground a short walk from the city centre. It was a gruesome sight to see bodies still sitting upright in their seats, covered in tarpaulin. Police removed the last body from the ground at 4 am yesterday, working under arc lights. The 51 other bodies of children, women and men were so badly burned that identification will take many days.
Only one person had been positively identified by police by early last night.
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