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Thanks for that. My girlfriend at the time, got off at Euston when they evacuated the station and decided to try take a bus to get to work. While waiting for

by kokey 15y ago

Thanks for that. My girlfriend at the time, got off at Euston when they evacuated the station and decided to try take a bus to get to work. While waiting for her bus, a bus exploded not far from where she was standing. Her reaction was to walk through the city to work, asking for directions along the way, walking even past my office. I couldn't reach her because the mobile network went out of action. She didn't want to come to my office because she knew I traveled in early to make it to a meeting and didn't want to disturb me (the meeting obviously got canceled). It's been hard for me to understand the thought process that made her want to take a bus when the station was being evacuated, and made her want to walk to work after that. I think it's been a case of the initial evacuation making her worry about getting to work on time and even though she didn't know about any explosions at that point she was already reacting in a panic. With the trauma of being near a blast, it must have anchored that thought process into becoming the most important mission for her to accomplish. I was on a train when they started evacuating a station, and I was praying to myself that the train leaves the station quickly in case the evacuation was for a bomb. Little did I know the bombs were on the trains themselves and not in the station, but my initial reaction was to get out of that station and to get out of the train network and away from public places and crowds as quickly as possible. This article helps explaining this thought process to me.

willyt 15y ago
That's exactly what I did, I used to get the Piccadilly line from Kings Cross going south around the time the bomb went off. The trains on that line at that time are really packed, about 4 to 5 people per m2, I can only imagine what it must have been like down there. But, I was 10 mins late that day and couldn't get on the tube to connect at Kings Cross. People were running out of my normal station but I ignored that and walked down to Kings Cross thinking 'stupid Northern Line I'll get on there'. When I got to Kings Cross there were lots of people milling around and walking away from there, I think I asked someone and they said the station was closed. So I just got on a bus on Euston Rd and went to work as normal. I bumped into a colleague on the bus and she said she had been walking past an air vent outside Russell Sq station when there had been a huge inrush of air and a deep rumbling sound. I remember saying to her that it was probably just the power supply going out, maybe a transformer explosion or something (we had just been discussing mitigation of transformer explosions at work a few days before). Obviously, it was a weird day at work, nobody did anything really. It was too far to walk home, I ended up getting 5 different busses, partly because the service was all over the place and partly because I had to get off one because I thought someone looked suspicious. I grew up in London and the three lines and the bus route that got bombed were ones that I had used regularly all my life, I took it quite personally that they had attacked 'my places' in 'my city'.

by kokey 15y ago

willyt 15y ago

That's exactly what I did, I used to get the Piccadilly line from Kings Cross going south around the time the bomb went off. The trains on that line at that time are really packed, about 4 to 5 people per m2, I can only imagine what it must have been like down there. But, I was 10 mins late that day and couldn't get on the tube to connect at Kings Cross. People were running out of my normal station but I ignored that and walked down to Kings Cross thinking 'stupid Northern Line I'll get on there'. When I got to Kings Cross there were lots of people milling around and walking away from there, I think I asked someone and they said the station was closed. So I just got on a bus on Euston Rd and went to work as normal. I bumped into a colleague on the bus and she said she had been walking past an air vent outside Russell Sq station when there had been a huge inrush of air and a deep rumbling sound. I remember saying to her that it was probably just the power supply going out, maybe a transformer explosion or something (we had just been discussing mitigation of transformer explosions at work a few days before). Obviously, it was a weird day at work, nobody did anything really. It was too far to walk home, I ended up getting 5 different busses, partly because the service was all over the place and partly because I had to get off one because I thought someone looked suspicious. I grew up in London and the three lines and the bus route that got bombed were ones that I had used regularly all my life, I took it quite personally that they had attacked 'my places' in 'my city'.