‘Hello, ambulance. Fire brigade here. We’ve had reports of an explosion at Liverpool Street underground station. No further details at present. Could we have an ambulance on standby, please?’
‘Certainly,’ I said, and after exchanging reference numbers with the fire brigade control room, I hung up and settled back down to read that morning’s Metro, full of happy stories about London’s winning Olympic bid. Upstairs, one of the dispatch desks arranged the ambulance without a second thought. It was just before 9 a.m. and there were plenty available. Calls to explosions are not uncommon. Usually they turn out to be nothing – a stink bomb, a gas canister, a small fire at worst.
Then a call taker sitting opposite me took a call from a member of staff at Aldgate East station. I saw her expression change from indifferent to concerned to gobsmacked. She waved a hand in the air to summon a supervisor. A gaggle of call takers peered over her screen to see what the fuss was all about.
‘Explosion at location,’ read the ticket. ‘Walking wounded leaving station with cuts and soot in hair. Delay obtaining info, caller is hysterical.’
Suddenly the call takers began running back to their phones as a Mexican Wave of activity broke out. Similar calls came in from Aldgate, King’s Cross and Russell Square. Confusion reigned: where was this incident? Had a caller given the wrong station name in their panic? Or were there two separate incidents? London Underground informed us that they believed a ‘power surge’ was responsible for the explosions, and that there had indeed been at least two of them.
Quickly, a manager declared a major incident and some of the more experienced members of staff donned fluorescent yellow jackets and went out to the incident control room. The dispatch desks went crazy. The resource centre rang up all those who had the day off and asked them to come in. People ran round the room flapping bits of paper at each other. Office-based members of staff left the office and came to the control room to add to the sudden bustle of activity. I was left manning the 999 phones, wondering what on earth was going on and what I would get next.
At about 9.20 a.m. I took a call from a rather flustered-sounding policewoman, from Paddington Police Station.
‘There’s been an incident at Edgware Road underground station!’ she said.
‘An explosion?’ I asked.
‘How did you know?’ she said, confused.
I explained that there had been explosions reported at umpteen other stations too, and we thought it was due to a power surge. At that point we didn’t know how many explosions there had been, we only knew how many stations were affected ( Liverpool Street, Aldgate, Aldgate East, King’s Cross, Russell Square, and now Edgware Road and Paddington) so we thought the situation was even worse than it was. By now, we were starting to disbelieve the power surge theory. It simply didn’t fit with the facts – why would a power surge affect stations on different lines, on opposite sides of the city, while intermediate stations were unaffected? Rumours
and speculation abounded as calls came in from hospitals, the press and members of the public. Were there two separate bombs at Russell Square and King’s Cross? Had the trains at Edgware Road collided? Had another bomb been found at Victoria? Had people been killed at Canary Wharf? Had a bus exploded near Euston?
We only knew the bus really had exploded when the first ambulance got there. All the 999 calls on the subject – all six of them – had been made from a building opposite ( by this point the mobile networks were down), but the callers had been forced to hang up as they had been evacuated from the building. Only one had got as far as mentioning the exploded bus before they hung up. It was impossible to distinguish these calls from a cruel hoax or the countless other rumours we’d received second-hand.
By 10 a.m. a state of organized pandemonium had crept in. People in fluorescent coats were shouting things about death tolls and numbers of casualties. We took a steady stream of calls and just tried to deal with them one at a time. We refused to send ambulances to all but the most serious of calls, and even some of those declined our aid, saying that the bomb victims needed us more and that they’d make their own way to hospital. Even though they were in the middle of a heart attack.
Everyone was given just ten minutes out of the room to contact their relatives.
The first call I made was to my boyfriend, Alan, who works in Hammersmith. He’d gone through Edgware Road station just fifteen minutes before the bomb went off.
He knew nothing about it.
‘Thank goodness you’re okay!’ I exclaimed.
‘Why on earth wouldn’t I be?’ he said, huffily. ‘Why are you ringing me at work? You never ring me at work!’
‘There’s been . . . things going on . . . people dead . . . explosions. . . bombs!’
‘Oh my God! Bombs?’
It didn’t seem real until I’d said it. But then I looked at the scene before me. Waterloo Road was closed. Ambulance Control had been turned into Fort Knox with a battalion of ambulances blocking the road, half the police force milling around on the steps and a big marquee full of important goings-on outside. I took in the scene before me: this was a real major incident – something people would remember for the rest of their lives – and there I was, right in the middle of it.
Things became eerily quiet in the control room around lunchtime. Manning was at full capacity but the call rate had actually gone down. There were no further explosions, all the ambulances were out dealing with casualties, and the general public had finally got the message and stopped calling. Mostly.
We all got to eat the free sandwiches which had mysteriously appeared from nowhere, and then it was decided we could start accepting calls again, although waiting times were horrific and London hospitals were only accepting emergency cases. GPs were sending those patients that couldn’t wait for treatment to Welwyn Garden City, Watford, East Grinstead and the like.
I got a lift home in a Patient Transport ambulance as there were no tubes running. The driver got lost and kept driving in circles around Aldgate. There was no sign of what had happened there just ten hours ago, but I knew.
I’d seen the reports.
Fifty-two people had been killed today, and seven of them had been killed at Aldgate.