Suzi Brent’s story – remembering 7/7

Suzi Brent – dispatcher, answered the first 999 call on 7/7

I was still quite new to call handling then and it just seemed like an ordinary call at first. It was the fire brigade calling on the phone telling us there had been some kind of explosion at Liverpool St. They thought it was a power surge. They didn’t have a lot of information other than that so I just took the information down and passed it on and moved onto the next call.

It started to get unusually busy for that time of day and I noticed that all my colleagues were engaged in taking calls. I heard someone getting a running commentary of what was going on at Aldgate East. We were getting calls from other stations and it sounded very odd – how could there be a power surge affecting all these places at once?

Some of our more experienced colleagues left the control room to go into our Special Operations Centre (SOC) wearing yellow tabards and we stayed behind to manage the response to the rest of London’s calls.

Suddenly this eerie quiet set in. Half the staff had moved into SOC and call handling were still doing our job but there weren’t any calls to take

I felt quite scared in general that we were in London in a vulnerable place – control room could be a target. I was scared for people I knew. I didn’t know if people I knew might be on the train.

That night someone drove me home because there was no public transport and we went past Aldgate station and I could see the remains of the response – the cordons – and that really brought it home to me.

It’s important to mark these anniversaries. Those people died and they are no longer with us and we need to remember their stories and we need to make sure this never happens again.