Rob Cox’s story – remembering 7/7

Rob Cox – watch manager, 999 control room

I woke up that day feeling really happy about London winning the Olympics bid the day before. Then this happened.

When the first call came in about a power surge at Liverpool Street, I grabbed a copy of the report and instantly got a gut feeling this was something out of the ordinary. Within minutes, it started to unfold and develop.

There was some initial confusion in trying to link the four locations together, but it quickly became apparent this was something far more sinister than a power surge.

My overriding memory of the day is how controlled and measured everyone was. As a Service, we’d always prepared for a single site scenario – never a multi-site event like this.

It got very busy very quickly. I remember worrying about whether we had enough people to respond: how would we still be able to send ambulances to the rest of London? Would there be another bomb? Where would that be? I didn’t really have time to panic though as we were just thinking about getting the right resources to the right place.

We were sending out runners on bikes and cars to get information back to us because we only had two radio channels back then.

I’m very proud of what we achieved and proud of everyone who was working on the road and in the control room. We hadn’t trained for a scenario like this but it changed how we work and I still think about it.