Confusion over London bomb drill

A consultancy agency with government and police connections was running a drill exercise for an unnamed company which revolved around the London Underground being bombed at the exact same times and locations as was happening in real life on July 7th, BBC Radio 5 has revealed.

In a BBC Radio 5 interview which was aired on that very evening, July 7th, the host interviewed Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, a firm which labels itself as a 'crisis management' advice company, also known as a PR firm.

Visor's managing director told the radio show's host that at the exact same time as the London bombings were taking place, his company was running a 1,000 person strong exercise drill in which the London Underground was being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.

The transcript is as follows.

POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.

HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?

POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.

According to Power the drill focused around 'simultaneous bombings'. At first the bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but that was later confirmed by police as being wrong and that in fact the bombings were only seconds apart, therefore simultaneous.

Click here for a clip of this dialogue. Click here for a longer clip where the comments can be heard in their full context.