Designing Resilience: Preparing for Extreme Events

8. Rapid Adaptation to Threat The London Bombings of July 7, 2005

143 8 Rapid Adaptation to Threat The London Bombings of July 7, 2005 David Alexander On a damp and unseasonably cool Thursday in July 2005, bombs set off by suicide terrorists exploded at four locations in the center of London. Exactly two weeks later, technical faults in bomb-making were the only factor that stopped a second wave of outrages from convulsing the city. If the bombs destined to be exploded on July 21 had gone off, London’s emergency services would have been stretched beyond their limits by exhaustion after fourteen days of coping with crisis. London is a well-prepared city, but neither its intelligence service nor its civil-protection system is infallible. The metropolis is too large, too diverse, and too cosmopolitan to be immune to premeditated and carefully planned outrages. The purpose of this chapter is to review the events of July 7, and their aftermath, in terms of the lessons that need to be learned in order to increase the resilience to disaster of metropolitan areas. In this context, “resilience ” can be viewed as the ability to deflect, absorb, or abate the impact of a disaster or major incident by preparedness, prudence, and the ability to react in a flexible and efficient manner to an event as it occurs. This means being able rapidly to overcome a significant number of problems and thus to “bounce back,” which requires concerted action on the part of all emergency services. It highlights the fact that the key to crisis management is to ensure that all agencies work effectively together during the crisis. If resilience requires the ability to mount collective action in an effective manner, the response of the London emergency services to the bombings was rather mixed. Now it may be that resilience cannot fully be in- 144 David Alexander vented—that is, it cannot entirely be dreamed up by planners—but it must be acquired through experience and testing. Although the local reaction to the events of September 11, 2001, was slow to develop, by 2005 the authorities in London had worked hard to develop business continuity, emergency plans, and sound alliances designed to respond to major incidents. They had behind them the experience of thirty years as a focus of Northern Irish terrorism. Yet the bombs created more disruption than any such events over the previous sixty years. Hence, through lack of adequate experience, mistakes were made, and inadequacies did reveal themselves, as this account will show. London and Its Emergency Services In London three hundred languages are regularly spoken. Its center, the cities of London and Westminster (finance and commerce versus government and entertainment), lies at the heart of a metropolis of 7.4 million people—about 25 million if all the towns and counties that each day depend on London to a greater or lesser extent are included. London proper has thirty-three municipalities, or boroughs, and only recently has it gained an assembly presided over by an elected mayor. Before that, the role of the lord mayor of London was largely symbolic. Moreover, for at least the last thousand years, the relationship between the city’s leadership and the national government that the city hosts has been an uneasy one. Organizations that deal with the administration of the whole city have periodically been set up and abolished, reflecting central government’s unease about letting London run its own affairs (Ackroyd 2000). When disasters occur in Britain, the police are usually the lead agency. They direct emergency operations on behalf of the other services and participants. This arrangement stems from a belief that emergencies are primarily matters of public order, an attitude that for better or worse is strongly rooted in British administrative culture (D. Parker and Handmer 1996). Emergency planners do exist in Britain—in fact, the UK Emergency Planning Society has more than twenty-seven hundred members—but emergency managers are dominated by the so-called blue-light services— police, fire, and ambulance (Hills 1994).1 In London the largest police force—though not the only one—is the Metropolitan Police, which has thirty-three thousand officers. The City of London Police Force is a separate, smaller organization that has jurisdiction over the city financial area, and the British Transport Police patrols the railways , underground train system, and buses. Rapid Adaptation to Threat 145 The London Fire Brigade has a long and honorable tradition of service to the capital...