Just watched a very powerful and moving BBC programme focussing on personal accounts of the 7/7/2005 London bombings (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kl0yv).
At times the tales are quite harrowing and upsetting, but what I think shines through is the remarkable resilience shown by those affected both during and after the explosions. None of those interviewed talk about panic, but instead provide accounts of unity, co-operation, and concern for others. About 75 minutes through it, one of the survivors mentions how before the explosions, people on the tube were all thinking of their own little worlds, but after the blasts they all of a sudden became one. This chimes very well with research we did into 7/7 that found altruism and co-operation were the norm rather than mass panic, and that this was often explained by how having a shared sense of fate created a common identity amongst survivors that encouraged mutual helping rather than selfish behaviour.
See here for a post I did on this blog after the 7/7 inquests closed last year. A paper I co-wrote on survivors' reactions to the 7/7 bombings can be reached here, and a non technical paper that covered a wider research project into mass emergencies I was involved in can be found here.
Finally, John Drury's posting on 7/7 (who was my co-author on this work) and the narratives that developed around it can be found here.
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