Unafraid!

unafraid
Originally uploaded by dario.agosta.

Thanks very much for your messages last week – it was so lovely and reassuring to know that you were thinking of me and everyone here.

I normally travel into work (from Caledonian Road tube to London Bridge tube) by bus and it’s only occasionally that I’ll catch the tube to work as it’s normally so crowded and hot! So thankfully I stayed with my normal plan yesterday. Thankfully also Kt, who works in Fulham went to work at her normal time, rather than 20 minutes later when she would potentially have been on one of the tubes that was bombed.

Didn’t really notice anything on the way to work, even though I was travelling above ground at the same time that everything was happening other than quite a few more people walking around, and a few ambulances. My bus takes me past Kings Cross and about 500 meters from where the bus bomb went off. When I got to the office, I noticed that the TV screens in reception were showing a newsflash of ‘Walking Wounded’ and so we checked the internet at our desks.

Realised what was happening and managed to get a text message to family before the phone system overloaded. E-mail was still working so I managed to check that everyone in London was ok. A friend of a friend was on one of the tubes but thankfully managed to get out with only glass scratches and smoke inhalation – she’s very lucky though and the scenes down there must have been horrific. I think people were down there for 30 minutes or more.

Our systems at work are pretty good with coping with an emergency, including cascading communications and contacting everyone. One of my team members, Charles, was AWOL and we had an anxious couple of hours trying to get hold of him. Finally he managed to call in from a phone box.

The transportation system was totally shut down and we were told at work to stay put. Our office building which is right next to Tower Bridge is brand new and pretty bombproof so it was a lot safer to stay inside. By about 4pm though, we were told that we could go home and so I met up with Charlotte and we walked to Angel together (took about an hour) then caught a bus home from there. Many people were walking as there weren’t many buses at that stage, but everyone was quite cheerful and there was none of the anger and annoyance when there’s a tube strike etc.

Unfortunately our section of the Piccadilly line is likely to be out of service for the next few weeks as there is probably quite severe damage to the tracks and tunnel so that’s going to make transport a bit harder than normal. There’s also a sense that we knew this was going to happen at some stage, London’s always going to be a target for this type of thing and has been in the past. So thankfully the emergency services were extremely well prepared and were able to cope with the situation.

I think everything should return to normal pretty quickly but people will be pretty shaky for a wee while which is understandable.