7/7 the day terrorism returned to London

London has been no stranger to terrorism over the years, with the IRA targetting the city many, many times over the years of its campaign. Travelling home as a teenager, I narrowly missed their bombing at Paddington, fortuitously having changed to an earlier train. Thursday was different, however, with the bombings being designed for maximum human impact & casulties, rather than the collaterol/symbolic damage characteristic of the IRA.

I’m not going to recount the events again, since WikiPedia has a comprehensive account, not to mention the coverage on the BBC News. What was remarkable about the whole day, was just how well everyone coped with the events unfolding around them. I was just at Waterloo shortly after 9, when the tube was being evacuated, with not a hint of panic showing. Of course, this was no doubt helped by it being reported initially as a ‘power surge’. Whether this was intentional or not, it certainly kept everyone (not directly affected) calm, as they continued our journeys into work, by bus or foot.
Having switched to the bus myself, it was rather sobering once in work to hear of the No. 30 bus having been blown up. Most of the day was spent inside, with the building security recommending us not to leave – in some of our client’s offices nearer to Liverpool St, there was a mandatory lockin of all staff. With the mobile networks severely overloaded (O2 apparently implemented the Access Overload contingency plans to restrict access to emergency services only), I had no access to e-mail, so just spent the day reading web news, and trying to call the few people for whom I had landline numbers.

Looking back on major events over the past 10-15 years, its interesting to see the new milestones in news reporting. The first Gulf War it was perhaps the first to see major near realtime TV reporting from right in the warzone. With 9/11, came the first real test of the Internet as a major media / news source – sadly it crumbled under the load with most news sites having to severely curtail their output, with most spending many hours effectively offline. The BBC has clearly done a fantastic job preparing their news site for traffic spikes, able to sustain a data rate of 1.7 Gb per second!!. The second Gulf War, was the first to see the use of blogs to provide eyewitness reports of events. Now, with the London bombings we see the first major use of camera phones to provide frontline pictures and even videos of events, to which traditional news reporters could not gain access. Although I must say, I didn’t much want to see the videos of the evacuation of the Picadilly line & was glad to read that news sites were pixellating the videos to tone down the graphic scenes.

Oh for it to be Wednesday again, with London rejoicing the after winning the 2012 Olympics, and the Open Source community rejoicing the dismissal of the bill which sought to introduce software patents to the EU.