Andy Trotter’s story – remembering 7/7

Andy Trotter OBE – Chair, then Deputy Chief Constable at British Transport Police

I was chairing a meeting at our HQ building near Tavistock Square and one of my chief superintendents banged on the door. He was wired up to the radios and mobile phones, getting live calls coming in about an incident at Aldgate East, then he hears it’s Liverpool Street, and then something at Edgware Road. And that’s how it was coming in and you could tell this was a mass attack. It couldn’t have been anything else.

I gathered together my senior officers and went into a control room and we thought we had possibly 10 or more locations as all these reports were pouring in. We had reports of a fire, a collision, a power surge. It was very confusing but in my own mind I could think of nothing else than that this was a concerted attack on the capital.

We dispatched officers to the scene, as did the Met as did City of London Police. The main thing was to get a grip on the scene. We sat down to see what we had got and who had gone where. Then there was an explosion. I’d never heard an explosion before but everybody knew. We could hear the bus bomb because we were just around the corner from it and the debris from the bus was landing on the roof of our building.

At that stage everyone wants to get up and rush out of the room but you just stop and dispatch the appropriate people to the scene and once we got the scale of it we knew Met Police would be taking over and we would be working very closely with them.

We didn’t know if there was going to be more bombs. We had the walking wounded coming into our building and we had to make sure we didn’t have a bomber walking through the door amongst the injured.

As the day unfolded, as it got more complex, I thought everyone was very calm and very measured. We brought order from chaos and let the capital get on in the middle of the worst attack we had ever seen.

I also thought some of the rescues were remarkable, particularly at Russell Square where the tunnel was very deep. People were going down the very long stairs laden with kit.

For me the lessons are, we have got to make sure we are always prepared. I know these exercises are expensive, they are time consuming but you can’t let it go. You’ve got to keep rehearsing.

I’ve been out with our incident response officers and it’s impressive their level of knowledge, their approach, to what would happen if we had another London Bridge, another Westminster because these things can happen at any time.

Remembering is important – remembering those who were killed – but also remembering those who played a major role in the rescue and recovery.