Initial London Bombing reports had simultaneous attacks?

by **glooperoo** » Thu Jul 14, 2005 2:04 am

I just came across something in an article from Tuesdays NY Times that jumped out at me, but it could be relevant. Apparently, the Underground's managing director <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/international/europe/12underground.html?pagewanted=print">initially reported that the explosions were simultaneous</a>, and it was the London Police that stepped in and said there was a 27 minutes delay between the second and third blasts: <blockquote>Quote:<hr> Confusion over the timing extended for almost two days. While the Underground's managing director, Tim O' Toole, initially insisted at a news conference that the explosions had been virtually simultaneous, the police put the time of the Edgware Road bombing on Thursday at 9:17 - 27 minutes after the bombings at two other subway stations. But police revised that chronology on Saturday, saying that, while emergency services arrived quickly at Edgware Road Station, the first call informing them that an explosion had taken place came at 9:17. At the same time, though, physicians said they were warned early to expect casualties commensurate with a serious attack. <hr></blockquote> This might be old news, but I didn't know they started off with this contradiction in the timing of the attacks. EzCode Parsing Error:=]Here's the whole article[, since it's the NY Times and they'll be charging people to read it soon enough: <blockquote>Quote:<hr> July 12, 2005 Transit Officials Now Concede They Did Not See Terrorism in the Initial Confusion By ALAN COWELL LONDON, July 11 - It was 8:51 a.m., the height of the morning rush hour on July 7, when the first emergency call came in. At 8:59 a.m., a train at Edgware station was reported to have hit a tunnel wall. At 9:01 a.m., a manager on the Metropolitan Line said that a person might be under a train at Liverpool Street. At 9:03 a.m., controllers on the Piccadilly Line received accounts of passengers running out of King's Cross station. Even as passengers, drivers and rescue workers struggled in darkened tunnels to evacuate trains and tend the wounded, controllers above ground at the subway system's Network Control Center struggled to interpret what they were seeing. "In the space of 12 minutes four issues have appeared on the network," said Peter Maclellan, a spokesman for the London Underground. "If you are sitting there, you wonder: What the hell?" At least initially, the reports suggested that what was unfolding before them was not a terrorist attack but something more mundane: a power surge or a fallen cable, according to Mr. Maclellan, who gave a new chronology of the attacks in an interview on Monday. His account suggested greater confusion about events aboard the stricken trains and stations of the London Underground than has been previously reported. Only at 9:15 a.m., 25 minutes after the first explosion, he said, did officials decide to declare "Code Amber" - a state of alert that required drivers to halt at platforms and evacuate the trains. It was not until 9:46 a.m. that "Code Red" was declared, shutting down the entire network, according to British press reports. At that hour, more than 200,000 people were traveling on more than 500 trains. In hindsight, Mr. Maclellan said, it is possible to pinpoint the computerized track records on the Circle Line and the breakdown of the internal phone system on the Piccadilly line to conclude just how closely the bombings were synchronized. All three attacks seem to have been made within 45 seconds of each other, at 8:50 a.m. A fourth bomb exploded aboard a bus 57 minutes later. Confusion over the timing extended for almost two days. While the Underground's managing director, Tim O' Toole, initially insisted at a news conference that the explosions had been virtually simultaneous, the police put the time of the Edgware Road bombing on Thursday at 9:17 - 27 minutes after the bombings at two other subway stations. But police revised that chronology on Saturday, saying that, while emergency services arrived quickly at Edgware Road Station, the first call informing them that an explosion had taken place came at 9:17. At the same time, though, physicians said they were warned early to expect casualties commensurate with a serious attack. Police and emergency vehicles were speeding through London, stunned passengers were emerging, faces blackened with soot, from subway stations. In the restricted spaces of the tunnels, paramedics tended the wounded as London's oft-rehearsed emergency planning for a major terror attack clicked into action. Hospitals cleared wards to receive the wounded. Buses were used as ambulances. The police told Londoners not to move around, and subway trains were evacuated. But for several hours, the authorities insisted that the subway system had been hit by a "power surge." That was the only official explanation of the mayhem until Prime Minister Tony Blair, the host for the world's most powerful leaders at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Scotland, publicly acknowledged that London had been hit by terrorists. At London Underground, though, the suspicion of a terrorist attack emerged among officials after 25 minutes of conflicting signals, Mr. Maclellan said. One of the London Underground executives in charge of the situation was Mr. O'Toole, the American managing director who joined the company in 2003 from Conrail, the Consolidated Rail Corporation. He was not available to be interviewed for this article, London Underground said. Using Trakernet, a computerized system that monitors trains on some lines, controllers could see that as train 204 traveled between Liverpool Street and approached Aldgate, it came to a sudden stop with pink lines on their screens indicating a power surge. The explosions at the three stations produced a rash of calls to emergency services starting at 8:51 a.m., Mr. Maclellan said, when someone called Britain's 999 number - the equivalent of 911. "Other reports poured in. Then, at 9:05 a.m., controllers learned that "walking wounded" were appearing at Edgware Road station. Elsewhere, at 9:09 a.m., another subway manager reported the "loss of a high tension cable" near Aldgate, but called back one minute later to say ambulances were needed. At 9:11 a.m., a further account said the electric power needed for the trains to operate at Russell Square station had failed and, belatedly, reported a "loud bang." By 9:15 a.m., "they are now getting a picture that something is very wrong on London Underground," Mr. Maclellan said. At that time, he said, "London Underground comes to the conclusion that we had a Code Amber." At that level of alarm, drivers are instructed to bring their trains into stations if possible and evacuate passengers. Others must wait in tunnels. "We had 500 trains on the network but we don't have 500 platforms," he said. Nonetheless, he said, the bulk of the network was evacuated "within one hour." Some passengers had already escaped. Like many others that rush hour morning on July 7, Jackie Humphrey was reading her newspaper aboard a Circle Line subway train heading east from Liverpool Street station. "Suddenly there was a massive explosion, there was this big yellow glow and then it went dark, pitch black," she said Monday. Ms. Humphrey was traveling in the fourth car of eastbound Circle Line train No. 204 heading from Liverpool Street to Aldgate to the east of the city center. A bomb exploded one car ahead of Ms. Humphrey, probably on the floor, according to police accounts. Seven people were killed. "There was glass and blood coming from behind me," she told reporters on Monday. "My hair was covered in soot and there was a terrible, terrible silence and then complete panic. People were screaming. There was more and more smoke coming from the carriage. Someone said there was a fire, which made people panic even more." At Edgware Road, across town, in the second carriage of Circle Line train 216 heading west toward Paddington Station, a second bomb exploded within seconds. Peter Zimonjic, a columnist for The Ottawa Citizen, was traveling on a Circle Line train heading in the opposite direction when train 216 exploded next to it in the tunnel. Seven people died in the explosion. In an initial account, which he corroborated Monday, he said he smashed a window to try to help survivors, and he tried to revive a passenger on 216. "Unfortunately, he was dead," he said. "A person was next to him, both legs blown off. She was dead. The person next to her, a gentleman in his 50's, was dead as well." Back to the east at King's Cross station, Piccadilly Line train 311, running in a much deeper tunnel, was heading south toward Russell Square when a bomb, again thought to have been left on the floor, exploded, killing 21 people - the worst death toll of the four explosions, possibly because of the narrow, deep Piccadilly Line tunnels that also made rescue more difficult. "I thought this is the end of the world, right here in this carriage," Steve Betts, a police rescuer, told The Guardian. "I found a man and his leg had been blown off below the knee; there was another body next to him. There was also what I thought was a pile of clothes, but as I passed to try and get to the man, it moaned and asked me for help. It was a woman. She had all her limbs blown off." Jonathan Allen contributed reporting for this article. <hr></blockquote>

Initial London Bombing reports had simultaneous attacks?

Initial London Bombing reports had simultaneous attacks?

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