The roads outside our office are eerily quiet today, without the constant queue of taxis for Waterloo which are usually outside (where the signs say “no taxis to queue here”) and without the bendy buses. Even cars and pedestrians seemed scarce – but then most of the pedestrians are commuters coming from Waterloo station.

The strange thing is that we all saw the effects of these explosions the minute they occurred, a long time before anything was on the news, but we didn’t know it.

We look after telephones, transmission systems and radio systems for London Underground and one of the ststems we have here is a Marconi EM-OS which manages the Jubilee Line network. At about a quarter to 9 the machine started beeping and all the nodes at the East end went red. As we were looking at them to investigate they started clearing.

We now know what happened – an explosion knocked out the electricity sub-station causing interruptions to power, which cleared as the battery back-up took over, and then later the Underground’s back-up power system.

Every time the machine beeps now we have to wonder whether another bomb has gone off somewhere or if its just a loss of signal from something plugged into our nodes.

Meanwhile, we have dozens of engineers spread across London, all ready to go in and fix anything which got broken, but they can’t get anywhere and wouldn’t be allowed in even if they could.

But we have found this with other emergencies (train crashes, fires, etc.). Although there is a lot of work for us to do, we have to wait until buildings are declared safe, or for forensic work to be done if its a crime scene. We have to be seen to be ready to respond to any requests for help, but we know that for us all the frantic activity will not actualy happen until tonight, or maybe tomorrow.

I can’t help wondering how I am going to get home though.