Supernovae
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The Guardian has published shocking new information about the 1985 Valley Parade stadium disaster, previously thought to have been an accident, in which 56 people died, when a stand went up in flames.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/15/bradford-fire-stafford-heginbotham-martin-fletcher
The allegations come from painstaking research by a survivor of the disaster, who discovered that at least 8 previous fires occurred at businesses connected to Higinbotham.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/15/bradford-fire-martin-fletcher-stafford-heginbotham
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/15/bradford-fire-stafford-heginbotham-martin-fletcher
The disaster at Valley Parade came at a time, according to Fletcher’s evidence, when the businessman was in desperate financial trouble, unable to pay his workforce beyond that month. Heginbotham had learned two days before the fire it would cost £2m to bring the ground up to safety standards required by Bradford’s promotion from the old Third Division that season. Yet this has never been reported and did not feature in the Popplewell Inquiry, chaired by the then high court judge Oliver Popplewell, which held its investigation only three weeks after the fire.
The inquiry heard only five days of testimony and concluded the fire was probably started by a match, a cigarette or pipe tobacco slipping through gaps in the floorboards on to litter that had built up over the previous 20 years. Fletcher does not accept that version and quotes a report by the Fire Research Station, a government-funded body, that “features of the Bradford fire required a detail of understanding greater than that presented to the formal inquiry”.
The allegations come from painstaking research by a survivor of the disaster, who discovered that at least 8 previous fires occurred at businesses connected to Higinbotham.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/apr/15/bradford-fire-martin-fletcher-stafford-heginbotham
“I never believed it was an accident and I never will. I don’t think Stafford intended for people to die. But people did. All because he went back to the one thing he knew best that would get him out of trouble.”