Question

The Hillsborough Football disaster stress analyses. Does the discussion present the ethical and professional responsibilities of the engineer and make informed judgements that consider the impact in global, economic, environmental, and societal context?

Answer 1

A meticulous examination of the warped barrier was prepared at the ground and after consequent removal to the HSE Laboratories. The barrier comprised of a horizontal tube and four vertical supports. The general direction of breakdown was near the bottom left-hand corner of pen 2 (as viewed from the pitch). The length of tube between supports had become detached from the supports and was bent uniformly to give a permanent deflection of 133 mm at mid span. The general appearance of the fracture surfaces suggested failure by a single static bending/tensile load, caused by loading in a horizontal direction towards the pitch. The material of the tube was found by metallurgical examination to be wrought iron and the tube itself had been formed with a longitudinal forged lap weld. A rolled-up newspaper was found inside tube 2/3; part of the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star dated Saturday 24 October 1931. The tube was originally retained on its supports by straps bent and riveted over the tube. Considerable corrosion had occurred under these straps where water had lodged and reacted with unpainted metal. The corrosion at the free end 4 of the barrier consisted of two holes right through the tube wall about 10 and 20 mm in diameter. Inspection revealed similar holes under the straps of other barriers in the vicinity. The tube itself had generally maintained its original dimensions away from the strap: it was protected by 13 layers of blue (for Sheffield Wednesday) paint on top of a primer coating. All the evidence pointed towards the failure being caused by plastic collapse of the tube caused by pressure applied by the crowd behind the barrier. Although other failure mechanisms were investigated (buckling of supports, etc.), the plastic collapse mechanism was found to give the lowest failure loads.

Engineers, in the fulfillment of their professional duties, shall:

1. Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public.
2. Perform services only in areas of their competence.
3. Issue public statements only in an objective and truthful manner.
4. Act for each employer or client as faithful agents or trustees.
5. Avoid deceptive acts.
6. Conduct themselves honorably, responsibly, ethically, and lawfully so as to enhance the honor, reputation, and usefulness of the profession.

Now, 25 years on, I still haven’t watched any video footage of Hillsborough, haven’t sought out the images. I sometimes wonder if I have been captured on film. I am in the pen to the right of the central pen, just underneath the advertisement hoardings. I must be there, somewhere. But I don’t feel the need to return and find myself in the footage. I was only too keen to get out of that ground that day. But, as anyone who was there that day can tell you, that ground and that day remains forever with us. And maybe that applies all the more to those friends and family members who were not there.

I took the fight for truth and justice into my academic work, going on to study political theory, ethics and philosophy. I realised that to demand truth and justice of our political institutions implies that those institutions are founded on such principles in the first place. I doubted this from the start. I went to philosophy out of a commitment not only to truth and justice but to found a society based on these principles. We will not get justice until our society is founded on justice, a justice founded on the commonality that is forged in the very relations between its individual members. As I wrote, the Hillsborough disaster is of universal significance.

For all of the complex arguments I learned in philosophy concerning ‘truth’ and ‘justice’, I have never lost sight of the fact that these values are not just abstract intellectual principles, concepts that are shuffled around, defined and re-defined in books; they are embedded in real lives and are expressed in relations between flesh and blood human beings. Here in Liverpool, people affirm truth and justice because Liverpool people value and do not forget their loved ones. And in Liverpool, a city that greets everyone with open arms, that’s an awful lot of people. It could be more, if other places could come to follow the example of the Liverpool campaigners and make that commitment to embody truth and justice in their relations to each other within their communities.