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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: Are our London friends allright?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 07-08-2005 01:23 PM
I traveled from York to London yesterday evening for a meeting at the British Film Institute today. As things happened, today was a non-event. Apart from the immediate vicinity of the bus bombing being closed to traffic (Tavistock Square and the main roads intersecting it) and the sections of tube lines in which the other bombs exploded being closed, London is now operating pretty much as normal. I walked from Waterloo to Stephen St. this morning, a trip of just under two miles which passes the entrance to Downing St. and then across Trafalgar Square. Apart from flags at half mast and the ground floor windows of the Ministry of Defence building having been boarded up (a precaution, presumably), anyone doing that walk who hadn't seen a newspaper or TV set in the previous 24 hours would not have had any clue that anything was wrong. There was the usual mix of camera-wielding tourists and suits to be seen, and traffic levels looked about normal, including red buses with occupied upper decks. The two people I was meeting with both commuted in by tube from different parts of North London, and both reported that the trains were running normally.
It was a very different picture yesterday evening. I rang the airline before I set out: they confirmed that flights were not affected, but that ground transportation was seriously disrupted. The first indication of anything amiss was that the flight was absolutely packed - there wasn't one unoccupied seat, and that plane is rarely more than half full in normal circumstances. Since the main line trains from Leeds and Bradford to London terminate at King's Cross, where one of the bombings took place and less than a mile from two others, they were suspended. So I imagine that this caused a stampede from the station to the airport. British Midland Airways must have made a tidy profit out of selling around 50-70 seats at the walk-on rate, I would have thought.
The second surprise was that we arrived at Heathrow via the eastern approach, which takes you right over the middle of London. The main north-south flight path for internal flights takes you south-east from Manchester, overflying Birmingham, Milton Keynes and Ipswich, before making a steep right turn over the Thames Estuary and following the river into the city, then finally making a further, shallow right turn over Chelsea and Kensington before descending over Chiswick and Hounslow into the airport (the alternative west-east approach is far less picturesque - about the only recognisable landmark is the Slough sewage farm). I'd have thought that they would have closed that airspace immediately, both due to the risk of a 9/11 type attack and because of the possibility of someone on the roof of a tower block with a surface to air missile. But they didn't, and as we flew over the city centre traffic appeared to be moving normally. Further west, however, there was virtual gridlock on almost every visible main road (this was at around 7pm).
The fun really started on the ground. The basic problem was that a constant flow of planes was disgorging thousands of passengers an hour, but the combination of the tube being totally shut down and congestion on the roads meant that there was no way of getting them out of the airport. It only took one look at the queue for taxis (at least 200 yards long, with one cab appearing every 10 minutes or so) to rule that idea out. After a wait of nearly three hours I caught a bus that was going to Hampton Court, which is about four miles from Wimbledon, where I was headed. The thinking was that if push really came to shove, I could walk the rest of the way (though four miles in light rain with an overnight bag and laptop wouldn't have been my idea of entertainment), but in the end managed to find a cab near where the bus terminated and got to Wimbledon just after midnight. But less than eight hours later, when I set out again, you'd never have known that any of this disruption had happened.
The other effect of all this on air transportation was that people couldn't get to the airport to join outgoing flights. I don't know if this made the news in the US, but it was mentioned on the radio this morning that earlier on Thursday afternoon, a Virgin flight left Heathrow for Los Angeles carrying only six passengers. At least they won't have had much of a queue at Immigration when they arrived!
I hope Dave's colleagues are on the road to recovery. One of my friends was on the Piccadilly Line tube behind the one which was bombed and had to wait a couple of hours before it was safe to walk down the tunnel, but thankfully she wasn't hurt.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-09-2005 02:51 AM
Gentlemen, I'm sure I can speak for the people of London when I thank you for your thoughts.
The situation here was rather confused on Thursday morning; at first it was thought that some sort of power surge on the Underground had caused the problem, but then this seemed not to be the case when the a bus exploded also. For a long time after this the BBC was reporting two dead, which later suddenly jumped to 33, and has slowly crept up since then. Several overseas media organisations seemed to get the facts quicker than the BBC did, or maybe the BBC decided to delay releasing them until they were absolutely certain of the facts.
Being killed in a terrorist attack is rather like being killed by lightning; it could happen to any of us at any time, and you cannot prevent it, at most you can only reduce the risk somewhat. There always have been terrorists in this world, and there always will be. Thankfully, the risks of being killed in this way are very small, though this is of little consolation to those who have lost friends or family in this attack.
Major disasters, whether natural or man-made are rare events; they kill a significant number of people at one moment in time, but then none for a much longer period, maybe years. Averaged out over a period of time, vastly more people will meet an early death from far more mundane causes than from terrorism. This is true even in the case of the WTC attacks; probably the largest scale terrorist attack there has ever been. I think the people recognise this, there was litte sign of fear in the voices of those interviewed on television news, even those with obvious injuries. The same thing applied when I first visited New York; though this was several months after the attacks, people were getting on with living their lives, doing the shopping, taking the baby to the park, or whatever.
People often talk of terrorists 'targeting' a group of people; there's really little real targeting, other than of symbols of whatever it is that the oppose; getting killed of injured in a terrorist attack really is a matter of luck. Some years ago I received very minor cuts from flying glass in an IRA attack in London. If I had been standing a couple of hundred metres away I could well have been killed; if somebody who was killed on one of the Underground trains had arrived at their station just a few seconds later they might have missed their train, and still be alive today. I was lucky, and they were unlucky; there's no logic, and no fairness, as to who gets the good, or the bad, luck in this.
London has come through much worse than this within living memory, and will do so again. If the aim of terrorism is to instil terror, then it does not seem to work, though those who employ it either do not realise this, or think that they can change that. I doubt it.
My thoughts to those who have sufferd in the events of this week.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 07-21-2005 09:24 AM
Several passengers on Underground trains reported bangs, and a smell like burning rubber. No visible damage to the trains, but three lines have been shut down. (Last time the entire system was closed). There was a report earlier that the device at Warren Street was a 'nail bomb', but this has not been confirmed. Also reports of the windows on a bus having been blown out. devices widely spread out, Warren Street is close to the centre of London, Oval is in the South, Hackney in the East and Shepherd's Bush in the north West.
Several heavily armed police seen entering University College Hospital, also in central London, reason not known.
That's about as much as we know at the moment.
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