Terrible things can happen in this world, and we are very very small. Hold tight to
those you love.
OK - have literally been swamped all day, as you might imagine.
It has been quite a day. On top of everything, I had my eldest son in the office on work experience. #2 son is on a school trip in Amsterdam. He called, almost in tears, and was relieved, I think, to be able to speak with both of us.
Produced
this at lunchtime, but it was of course subject to the lack of clarity and confirmation at the time.
Wrote the following column for Forbes:
What we know and what we don’t know….The most priceless commodity in times of crisis is trustworthy information. And so it proved this morning in London, as the city lurched from yesterday’s euphoria over winning the Olympics to the chaos and confusion wrought by deadly, co-ordinated terrorist attacks.
This was the most serious terrorist attack in Europe since the bombing of the Madrid rail network last March, and – just as in Madrid – alongside the actual, terrible death toll, comes an inevitable fear among the wider population as we realise the sheer vulnerability of something as fundamental as our transportation system.
The media’s treatment of today’s events reflected the general state of confusion which covered the city like a blanket.
Initial television news reports shortly after 9am on Sky News, followed quickly by ITV and the BBC, were sketchy, and spoke of a reported "blast" at Liverpool Street –one of the busiest rail stations. But after initially calling it an explosion, it was thought the noise may have been the sound of two trains colliding, or some kind of power-surge related incident.
The first reports of casualties from the scene quoted British Transport Police saying one person was suffering a "life-threatening injury" and there were several "walking wounded".
But even as the Sky anchor was speculating that the life-threatening injury may have been due to a heart condition, at least 33 people were dead and scores injured in three separate explosions on the tube network.
The first, at 8.51am, police said happened on a train between Liverpool Street and Aldgate East stations and claimed seven lives.
Five minutes later, 21 people were killed in an explosion on the tube’s Piccadilly Line between Russell Square and King’s Cross stations.
Twenty-one minutes after that, five more people died in an explosion at Edgware Road underground station.
Many commuters were still on their way into the capital’s financial district when the tube network was halted, stations evacuated and people were forced to take to cabs or buses.
And that, it seems, was exactly what whoever planned this had wanted; since at 9.47am, a blast tore through a packed double-decker bus at the junction of Woburn Square and Tavistock Place, near the British Library.
Following the initial reports, the BBC patched into police video footage, and as such was unable to control when it switched from one location to another, while Sky News had a reporter in the air providing live pictures from their helicopter.
But even as the channel was reporting that the explosion on the bus had happened, the helicopter for some reason didn’t immediately head to that location. When pictures of the damaged bus eventually emerged, they suggested that many people must have been hurt in that attack.
The TV networks already had camera crews at Stratford station in East London to follow up on yesterday’s Olympic decision for their breakfast shows, and were able to interview commuters as they were evacuated, but that yielded little in the form of authoritative information. Hence, the initial confusion among the mainstream media led inevitably to the spread of anxious rumours and exaggeration – of which there were many – compounded by a lack of any official confirmation or definitive statements.
But just as traditional media outlets were starved of accurate information, so too were ‘citizen journalists’ and, indeed, citizens themselves.
As it started to become clear that this was a co-ordinated series of events, the mobile phone networks simply collapsed under the strain as people tried to contact loved ones. Yet while hugely frustrating, that lack of contact at least did nothing to spread confusion still further, as the pervading sense of uncertainty continued.
Memories of the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks in New York doubtless reminded many that we all carry a different recollection of when we believed the attacks were "over".
For much of the day the authorities – from a police force stretched by the deployment of extra officers to the G8 summit in Scotland to the prime minister himself – seemed to be largely labouring under the same lack of certainty as the rest of us.
Despite operating in the same fog as traditional news organizations, a number of London blogs rose to the occasion;
Tim Worstall and Robin Grant’s
perfect.co.uk both gave a running commentary of events, illustrating the difficulty we all had in filtering accurate information from multiple sources.
In due course, as mobile services picked up,
the excellent BBC web site was soon able to run with some dramatic cameraphone images sent in by viewers of passengers making their way along tube tunnels from a stalled train at Kings Cross station, as well as of the destroyed bus. Some of their eyewitness accounts were harrowing.
Probably inevitably, shortly before noon, a group calling itself The Secret Al-Qaeda Organization in Europe supposedly claimed responsibility for the attacks on an islamist web site.
"Heroic mujahedeens carried out a sacred attack in London, and here is Britain burning in fear, terror, and fright in the north, south, east and west," the statement is supposed to have read, as it – predictably – warned of further attacks against countries which have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But in keeping with the general lack of clarity that has characterised today, however, it remains unclear, despite a
modus operandi similar to the Madrid attacks, whether or not this previously-unknown group actually exists, or whether they had anything to do with these tragic events in our beautiful city.
