BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
Sudbury?s British community is reeling after learning about a series of explosions, suspected to be the work of terrorists, that devastated London?s transit system on Thursday morning.
At Northern Life?s press time, at least 37 people were confirmed dead and 700 others injured in the attacks, which hit three subway stations and a double-decker bus in the British capital.
If somebody wanted to bring the city to a standstill, they went about it the right way, said local psychologist Chris Nash. She grew up in Devon, England, and worked on Fleet Street in London as a young woman.
?Each station is exactly the one you?d want to hit. Oldgate is in the west end in the theatre district, Russell Square is right near the British museum, and the Russell Square Hotel and the President Hotel are very popular tourism hotels,? she said.
?And then they get Liverpool Street, where everything comes and goes. It?s very much a hub...There has to be a lot of chaos right now. The underground is what keeps London going.?
The death and injury toll is likely to rise because so many people would have been in those areas when the bombs hit, she said. The first blast was recorded at 8:51 am local time, and the last at 9:47 am.
One of the Nash?s relatives is a mounted police officer in London, but she?s fairly sure he?s safe. He?s probably helping to keep people out of the perimeter of the city right now, she said.
Another relative was due to graduate from medical school in northern England Thursday, so most of the family was probably far away from London. Chris and her husband, Roger, are attempting to contact them just to be sure.
?Whenever these things happen, I always think if only the people doing it would realize that it only firms up the resolve to hit back and to assume that
everyone who isn?t like you is bad or wrong,? she said.
?That?s what George Bush is doing. He?s been fear mongering. But now he?s justified, you see.?
Roger grew up in the town of Maidenhead just outside of London. The Laurentian University philosophy professor says the bombings have deeply
saddened him.
?Any case of innocent people dying would make me feel awful. It?s happened in Britain this time, but it?s also happened in Spain and United States, and may happen in other places again,? he said. ?It?s a bad way of people trying to solve their problems.?
London has relatively high levels of security after the IRA bombings in the mid-1990s, said Roger. Yesterday?s attacks show that it?s hard to prevent terrorism.
?We don?t know who caused it. Some people are being very careful not to do that. Somebody did it, obviously, but who and why may take a long while to work out,? he said.
Lionel Rudd, who grew up in a small town close to London, said his brother-in-law and his family live in the city. Rudd?s niece narrowly avoided being in the middle of an explosion.
?My niece normally travels up to the city where she works. She would have been at Liverpool Street station when the explosion took place if she had gone to work today. She?s on vacation,? said Rudd, an engineering professor at Laurentian University.
Rudd, who teaches an explosives course at LU, says technology has developed to the point that one person could have planned and carried out the attacks.
The professor said he?s concerned about the possibility of racial backlash against Muslims in England. There are a lot of problems with racism in the country, he said.
Attacks like these are extremely effective because they take people by surprise, said Dr. Mary Powell, a political science professor at Laurentian University.
?Surprise is how the terrorist terrorizes the population. And either, as in places like Palestine and Israel, you learn to live with that possibility, or in other situations, you think, all of a sudden, that nothing?s safe,? she said.
Powell thinks it?s unlikely that the bombings have anything to do with the G-8 summit happening this week in Gleneagles, Scotland. If the G-8 had been their target, they would have bombed Gleneagles, she said.
Nobody knows who is responsible for the attacks, but it?s probably not the IRA, said Powell. The IRA always used to call in before their bombings,
and that never happened in this case, she said.
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