Notes from underground

"All the staff have remained very calm," a customer told my colleague on the evening of the bombings.
"We were expecting it," he told her.
The best trailed terrorist attack in history finally arrived. The predicted horror, terror and grief were all present and correct. I have written before that the worst kind of disruption to the tube is a suicide. How much worse is three suicides, all with explosives attached?
Underground staff are typically a stoical bunch, and for most of them Thursday was no more disrupted than countless days in the past when stations have had to be evacuated. For those not directly affected, stopping the service and kicking all the passengers out into the street is as normal as it gets.
For those at the sharp end, things were spectacularly different. Told to investigate trains stalled due to power surges, staff were faced with scenes from Dante. As the number of incidents grew, staff had to hold the fort for a prolonged time before emergency services arrived. Even then they maintained their stiff upper lips. We've all read of the station assistant who held the hand of an injured man for many hours and then reported in for her duty at 7am the next morning. No shirkers in this company! The assumption is, of course, that she must be new.
Managers could not make up their minds whether they wanted station checks—looking for suspect packages—or not. But nowadays, of course, we have to be alert, not for suspect packages, but for suspect personages, which means nearly everybody. To this end somebody has decided to post police at station gates in the rush hours. Perhaps this is so they can get blown up with the rest of us, because it certainly doesn't seem to achieve anything tangible.
Even before the bombs went off, the Northern line was experiencing "severe delays"—a technical term, incidentally, not a catch-all, whatever you may think—and this may have played a role in the day's events. It is thought that the bus bomber tried to enter the Northern line at King's Cross, only to be turned away because of the overcrowding. This may well be the first time that the Northern line's endemic failings have saved lives. Little consolation for the passengers on the bus.
For the most part, the bombings have affected the general public only slightly. For the first few days, passengers were being unusually nice to staff, but they've since found their feet. The managers for once surpassed themselves, delivering a cornucopia of fruit, cans of drink and even Belgian chocolates to their stations. Although a nice gesture, it seems mainly to have only provoked lengthy arguments between those on duty on the big day and those on duty when the goodies arrived. That other popular goodie, overtime, has also been in abundance.
After the initial backslapping for how well the unprecedented situation was handled, some questions have emerged about delays in communication. After the early confusion, emergency instruction Code Amber was declared at 9.15am. Code Amber tells drivers to proceed to the next station and await instruction and tells supervisors to talk to their line controllers. The instruction in this instance was to evacuate the entire network, perhaps the first time that this has happened since the second world war. However Code Amber was never adequately communicated around the network, and at 9.30am passengers were still being sold tickets and entering the system. They weren't, of course, getting on any trains. Another supervisor told me that it was only when he called the helpline to find out where his trains were that he discovered he was supposed to evacuate the station.
This seems bizarre, since the underground has BBMS, the breakdown broadcast messaging system, by which means the network control centre (NCC) passes messages directly to loudspeakers in all station booking offices and supervisor offices. This system is normally the bane of our lives, reporting relentlessly, with no volume control, every particle of insignificant information it can muster. And in any case, the NCC can remotely evacuate stations itself by sending its message out to all station PA systems. That neither of these systems was used properly presents a less rosy picture and should probably feature in any investigation. This would have been especially relevant had there been any chemical or biological agent involved. That terror, which we were spared this time, would have been exacerbated by an incomplete clearing of the whole system.
But, mostly, 7/7 was one of those rare occasions when the underground became the centre of attention without having done anything wrong. A few of us were even heroes of the hour. The positive coverage cannot last, of course. And once the tunnel has been cleared, watch out for arguments between the various PPP protagonists as to who foots which bills.