Word: underground
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...subway system is completely closed for the first time in its venerable 142-year history, by the afternoon buses are running and cabs are available. The city is as crowded as always, and, notably, its skyline has of course remained the same—as much as the Underground, which is used by close to three million Londoners daily, may be a symbol of the city, these attacks will not remain as legible in the city’s architecture nearly four years later as the attacks on New York in September 2001 still are today...
Some signs of normality are particularly vivid: on Thursday night, the night of the attacks, a number of homeless people make their beds at Marble Arch, in the still accessible passageway to the Underground. They do not have the luxury of deciding to move to a safer part of the world, unlike the tourists who returned home after the attacks. On Friday, retail shopping at the many department stores on Oxford Street proceeds unfettered. Despite their adverse effect on the stock market, the attacks have not stopped most shoppers’ determination to take advantage of sale prices...
...packages or riders showing signs of illness. The idea is to identify a problem--fast--so evacuation can begin. That's because while a train bombing is bad, a biological, chemical or radiation attack on a train is an epidemic snaking through a city via a web of underground tunnels...
...with a cell phone. Once we accept that some attacks are inevitable, we can do sensible things to limit the damage and disruption--like using blast-proof glass in buses. Even things like emergency lighting can save lives. In London, it took more than an hour to clear the Underground. Many could not get out of cars or navigate pitch-black tunnels...
...below the surface, on so-called "cut and cover" lines, so the force of the blast was dissipated into a relatively wide tunnel. Seven people died at Edgware Road and seven at Aldgate. But the bomb on the Piccadilly Line near King's Cross was in one of the Underground's deep tubes, some 100 ft. below the surface. There the blast had nowhere to go, and emergency workers said the scene was hellish. Twenty-one people are known to have died on the train, although as the rescuers searched for more bodies in the sweltering rat-infested tunnels...