7 July inquests hear emergency calls

After a five year wait, the inquests into the deaths of the 52 victims of the London bombings on 7 July 2005 began today.

A series of calls between supervisors at Tube stations, London Underground control centre and emergency services were played to the court.

Operators, who receive one report after another, at first attribute explosions and “thick black smoke” to a power failure.

The first calls played to the court reported perceived power failures but the emerging picture becomes more serious as the operator receives reports of a “bang”, walking wounded and passengers in the tunnels.

However, a considerable amount of time elapses between the blasts and the moment staff at the control centre accept there may have been a series of bombings on the transport network.

Shortly after the attack at Aldgate, one caller tells the operator: “We have just had a big explosion, there appears to be something ahead of the train on the track. We have evacuated.”

“Something’s gone badly wrong down there” Tube station manager 9.06am

As the confusion continues staff struggle to piece together the precise details of what is happening across the London Underground network.

In another recording, the operator is heard calling emergency services but shows a reluctance to dispatch rescue workers.

“We don’t want to send anyone at the moment,” he says.

Describing the reports, he adds: “We are not looking at an act of aggression at the moment.”

He then receives another urgent-sounding call from the supervisor at Aldgate saying: “We have had thick smoke coming from the tunnel. We have customers on the track.

“We have tried to get down to assist them but the smoke is really heavy.” The operator reassures her that emergency services will be sent to the scene.

“We will get them along, we will send them to you,” he is heard saying.

In another call, the operator is told one Tube station was “lit up like a Christmas tree”.

A female caller tells him: “People are coming up covered in smoke and injured, and they have just taken my first aid kit.”

The calls played before the Inquests this afternoon will feature prominently in what is expected to be a comprehensive analysis of the emergency response to the bombings, writes Andy Davies.

"Could more have been done to help those who died" is one of the key questions facing the inquests, says Clifford Tibbor, a solicitor representing the families of six of the victims and Hugo Keith QC, counsel for the inquests, outlined briefly today how that important issue will be explored.

The inquests, he disclosed, will examine whether there were delays in the emergency responders reaching the scenes of the explosions and when they did arrive, whether they gave the most appropriate medical treatment to those injured.

Basic emergency infrastructure will also be scrutinised: was there sufficient lighting on the trains and in the tunnel, for instance, and were there failures with regard to difficulties in the operation of phones and radios below and above ground?

It was disclosed also today that extensive work has been conducted by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine to assess the effects of explosive forces on the human body. So their experts will be expected to give evidence on whether it's possible to plot blast injury types and measures by which such injuries are deemed "survivable".

‘Not terror related’
Steve Gozka, manager of Edgware Road Tube station, rang London Underground’s Network Control Centre (NCC) at 9.06am to repeat a request for the emergency services to be sent.

“Something’s gone badly wrong down there,” he says. “There’s people coming up with cuts and covered in s***.”

At 9.11am the NCC operator tells a member of staff at Russell Square station that they “didn’t think (it was) terrorist” at that stage.

This point is repeated when a worried manager at Morden station calls the control room at 9.32am to ask what was happening on the Tube, only to be told it was “not believed to be terrorist-related”.

But immediately afterwards the NCC operator tells an official from the Railway Inspectorate that the explosions were either caused by terrorism or by a power cable.

“I’m leaning towards terrorism at the moment, but I can’t tell you that,” he says.

‘Confused picture’
Hugo Keith QC told the coroner: “Those calls reveal considerable difficulties in assimilating the information that is coming in and plainly a very confused picture presented itself.

“What does, you may feel, seem rather surprising, is that probably on account of the fact that the bombs had exploded in tunnels away from public sight, no one at Edgware Road or Aldgate or King’s Cross/Russell Square, having spoken to passengers or perhaps to the drivers or perhaps to having seen the carriages themselves, was able to phone the NCC and say definitively that there have been bombs.

“A considerable amount of time had elapsed, you will have seen, from the moment of the explosion of the bombs to the acceptance by the staff of the NCC that in fact they were bomb-related.”