7/7 Bombing - The official report

Well, I've sat and read it...and the unabridged 3rd part of the report too which contains all the uncut witness statements...but to chop a very long story (part 1 is 157 pages long!) a bit shorter these were the snippets that most interested me -

'There was obviously no communication from anyone; I did rather pathetically pull the emergency handle at one stage. It was a desperate need to do something' - Kirsty

'...that was the main concern, if there was smoke, there must be a fire on its way, burning down the tunnel towards us. If people had known there was no fire through someone making contact with us the situation could have been a lot calmer. I think the most important thing that needs to be recognised is us not having contact with anyone. Not long after the bomb went off, we all tried to stay quiet to hear for help, all we could hear were the screams from the other carriages, to our horror we then heard a train,thinking it was coming towards us people were screaming there was a train coming towards us and that no-one knew we were down there.' - Emily

'I saw the flash, the orange-yellow light, and what appeared to be silver streaks, which I think was some of the glass coming across, and what I can describe as a rushing sound. There was no bang I heard; it was just a lot of noise. I had been twisted and thrown down to the ground. About halfway down to the ground the brain clicked in that it was a bomb. You then think you are going to die. When I hit the ground, it was all dark and silent and I thought I was dying' - Michael

'Just after the train left Edgware station, there was a massive bang followed by two smaller bangs and then an orange fireball. I put my hands and arms over my ears and head as the windows and the doors of the carriage shattered from the blast. Splintered and broken glass flew through the air towards me and other passengers. I was pushed sideways as the train came to a sudden halt. I thought I was going to die. Horrific loud cries and screams filled the air, together with smoke, bits and chemicals. Large and small pieces of stuff hit me and covered me. A book jammed itself between my shoulder and a panel at the side of me. I was hit on the head by a piece of metal that gave me a headache. I was covered in splinters and broken glass made from the window behind me. My eyes were sore and very dry from the fireball. Rubbing them made them only worse. Small splintered pieces of glass were sticking in my head and face. I could not breathe; my lungs were burning because of the smoke and the dust. I crashed my head between my knees to get some air. There followed a silence." - John

‘...there was a very strange noise. It wasn’t like a bang; it was like a muffled whooshing sound almost, but then the bus was very packed"..."Being sort of ensconced, I didn’t hear – I saw, but I didn’t really hear it very loudly. There was a mass exodus off of our bus, as things were still coming to the ground and bits were flying everywhere. The only thing I do remember is the carnage and everything as it hit the floor. I remember looking at the bus, and I remember initially thinking, 'What is a sightseeing bus doing there?' because that is actually what it looked like. From the front, that is what it looked like; it didn’t look like a London bus. Now I know why, but it didn’t look that way to me. It looked like one of those that has the roof off. It wasn’t until I actually saw the blood, and the smells, that I thought something is really wrong here and not right. It sounds almost ridiculous to say it, but it was just such a surreal thing; I still have trouble explaining it." - M

‘The floor went completely up to my seat, and I’m mid-air with a strand of floor remaining,keeping me from falling from the upstairs seats. I looked behind me and everybody and all the seats had vanished. I just went into flight mode. I just stuck my foot out and launched myself off. I hit the side of the bus on the way down onto the pavement…I jumped down and I was just screaming. It is funny, because I couldn’t hear anything. It was like somebody had got you and stuck you at the bottom of a swimming pool. You are so disorientated, all my clothes were hanging off me where they had all shredded. It blew the top of my shoe off – a heavy-stitch leather shoe’ - Gary

‘I couldn’t see. I had never experienced anything like that before. I can’t talk for other carriages but, in the first carriage, you could see nothing. Then somebody said, “Has anybody got a torch?” I thought, “That is fair enough”. He said, “Get your mobile”. What is the point of getting a mobile phone out? Then, apparently, the modern phone, if you open them up, they have quite a bright light. All you see is a beam about half an inch in diameter. You couldn’t see the hand that was holding that light; you couldn’t see the arm; you certainly couldn’t see the person that was holding it. They soon put them away, because it wasn’t having any effect at all’ - George

‘A man appeared at our carriage door from the bombed train, into the door that door of his carriage had been blown off, and he was trying to force open the had been facing the tunnel. He had been standing in the bombed carriage; the door of his carriage had been blown off, and he was trying to force open the doors to get into our train. He was shouting for help. He was yelling and, I think that is because of the blast, he could not hear. His clothes were ripped and he was bleeding heavily. He looked like the victim of a bomb blast. It was then that we all realised that something terrible had happened. The man managed to get his hands through the rubber seal running down the centre of the door, and three of us went forward to try to open it. I do not know if it is due to the design of the train, or whether our train became buckled, but we could not force the door open more than three, maybe four, inches. It was enough for him to get his hand round; again, we could see that he was bleeding heavily’...‘The driver of the train from Paddington passed through our carriage at this point checking to see if anyone was injured. I asked him if he could open the first-aid box, as we needed to get bandages etc into the second train. He told me that he did not have the key; he also said that the box would be empty anyway’...‘I then carried on up the stairs at Edgware Road and found myself outside the station. There was quite a lot of confusion above ground. There were several police cars, ambulances, blocking off the road. I walked up to the cordon and asked a policeman what I should do. He advised me to go home. I then asked him if I needed to leave my name and address and my details. I also asked him if we needed to be tested to see if the smoke we had been breathing in may have some sort of chemical poison etc. He told me to go home and watch the news to find out’ - Ben

"London’s telephone networks experienced unprecedented volumes of traffic. Vodafone experienced a 250 per cent increase in the volume of calls and a doubling of the volume of text messages. There were twice as many calls on the BT network as would normally be the case on a Thursday morning. Cable & Wireless handled ten times as many calls as usual to the Vodafone and O2 networks – 300,000 calls were placed every 15 minutes, compared to 30,000 on a normal working day. O2 would normally expect to handle 7 million calls per day. On 7 July, 11 million calls were connected – 60 per cent more than usual - and this does not include unsuccessful calls."

"...the City of London Police made a request at 12 noon to O2 to shut down the O2 network to the public in a 1km area around Aldgate station. O2 carried out the appropriate validation procedures, but these procedures, set by the Cabinet Office, do not include verifying the request with the Gold Coordinating Group. The O2 network was therefore closed to the public – outside the command and control structure - at about noon, and remained closed down until 4.45 pm. During that period of time, O2 estimates that ‘Several hundred thousand, possibly maybe even more than a million’ attempted calls by members of the public were lost."

EH??? So the Police use O2...If you are on the O2 network, DITCH IT, what's the point of having a mobile phone that gets turned off in an emergency??

‘Normally in an incident like this, we would pass the information to Gold Control. They would have an overview of the whole of London and would say, for example, ‘yes, the Homerton has not been hit. We have asked it to activate its plan. Patients can be decanted from the scene to that area’. However, the reality of the situation was that your last telephone call said that there were eight bombs. That was the last message that you had received. You therefore had a picture of Armageddon – you do not know what is going on." - Dr Gareth Davies

"We are not one of the 11 acute hospitals. We are not informed of any incident. For us, the communication problem was particularly important. We did not have any, apart from people hammering on the back door and asking for help. We are next to Russell Square, so that was coming from the ambulances who were at the scene. We were asked for equipment … We were not told of anything that was going on until we found our nurses’ homes had been sealed in the police activity and I could not get staff in or out. We were not told because it was not an NHS incident so they felt that we did not need to know, seeing the London picture is vital to the whole NHS’. Judith Ellis, Chief Nurse at Great Ormond Street