Remembering 7/7

Eight years ago on this date – on July 7, 2005 – suicide bombers killed over 50 people in London in  a series of terror attacks on  buses and tube trains during the morning rush hour.

More than 700 people were injured, many severely.

While 7/7 wasn’t of the magnitude nor horror of 9/11 four years earlier, it was very much our 9/11 moment.

I was in London on that day  – the day after the celebrations of the news that London had won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics – and was in a meeting when the first news came of the bombings. I lived in Amsterdam at the time and was due to return there later that day. I managed to do that although caught up in the chaos and panic of unfolding events when it wasn’t really clear exactly what had happened.

Those were the days when ‘social media’ meant blogging – there was no Twitter, no Facebook, no pervasive wifi or cellular data networks and connectivity; not even the mainstream awareness of what you could do even if you had the means to do it.

If you wanted to know what was going on at a time of very fast-moving events, you looked to the mainstream media especially TV and radio (and has that really changed even today?)

There was podcasting, still in its infancy – Shel and I had started FIR at the beginning of that year. I remember recording some thoughts on my digital audio recorder about what I’d experienced that day that, while unquestionably nothing compared to the experiences of those actually caught up in the killing fields on buses and trains, nevertheless was a shocking experience.

Here’s that recording – one person’s snapshot impressions from a terrible day eight years ago.

In memoriam.