ABSTRACT
The 1989 Hillsborough and Marchioness disasters happened after a long-term build up of risk over many years, with failures at organisational and individual levels in the management of health and safety across all the levels of design, facility and operations. As in the King’s Cross, Piper Alpha and Clapham disasters reviewed in Chapter 1, they challenged the assumptions that all disasters are automatically perceived as unforeseeable Acts of God, and demonstrated the phases of a disaster, theorised by Scraton et al (1995). They also illustrated the broader sources of vulnerability from the enterprise culture, and deregulation to the constant restructuring, which provided a backdrop to the organisational cultures that prioritised business and enterprise over safety in the 1980s (see Fagan, 1990; Moore, 1990; Gifford, 1996).
