Yesterday marked the 20th Anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, where 96 football fans were crushed to their deaths during an FA Cup semi-final clash between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.
Two minutes silences were held outside Liverpool’s Anfield stadium and also in Sheffield and Nottingham respectively.
The crush was caused by thousands of fans pouring into a narrow tunnel at the rear of the Leppings Lane stand, which was a standing terrace, which had been opened as an intended exit for fans who were already crammed into the central pens. This caused a huge crush at the front of the terrace and people were pushed up against the fences by the capacity and weight of the crowd behind them.
As the pens filled up fans became so tightly packed in the stand that many died standing up of compressive asphyxia, unable to breathe.
In addition to the 96 killed over 750 suffered injuries and over 300 hundred were taken to hospital.
As a result of the Hillsborough tragedy the Taylor inquiry was commissioned to examine what went wrong at the stadium and who was to blame. The conclusions of Lord Taylor’s report were that the disaster occurred as a result of police failure to control the fans effectively.
On a normal match day there would usually be police or stewards present at the gate to contend with the flow of people coming in and to direct them away to the side pens but on this occasion there were not. Why this was still remains unclear despite numerous enquiries.
In the aftermath of the disaster a number of psychiatric injury claims were bought forward one of which was Alcock and others v Chief Constable of the South Yorkshire Police [1992] 1 A.C. 310. These centered on claims that in watching the game on television or listening to it on the radio people had suffered shock or trauma as a result of witnessing or hearing the events of the tragedy unfold.
Debate continues to this day about with whom the responsibility lays for the Hillsborough disaster but twenty years on the tragedy still looms large in the memories of the many who lost friends and relatives.
