Of course, I don't deny the utter integrity of everyone who's posted here, but...
If you were to count all the people who, running late due to a hangover, or a lost shoe, or a sneezing fit at Seven Sisters, narrowly missed being killed on 7/7, would that number be higher or slightly lower than the entire population of London?

(ADDENDUM - To put it another way, which is higher: the number of narrow escapes from the 7/7 bombs, or the number of fragments of the True Cross for sale in pre-Reformation Europe?)
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 10:38, 16 replies)

Yes.

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 10:39, closed)

Thanks.
I can stop worrying now.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 10:45, closed)

Agreed.
And not just for those particular bombings. The only convincing post I've seen is the one about being caught in the Rammstein aircrash.
If you heard or saw the bomb go off, or got shrapnel in the leg rather than the forehead, that's a narrow escape. If you were using public transport in the same district, not so much.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 10:55, closed)

That was partially my point;
but there's a bit more to it, inasmuch as there seems to have been as many narrow escapes from 7/7 as there were fragments of the True Cross floating around pre-Reformation Europe.

Hmmm - I think I may have to interpolate that into the OP...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:01, closed)

What are your parameters for a 'Narrow Escape', though?
In my book, taking the 7/7 bombings as an example, if you were in the location of one of the bombings going off, within about ten minutes of it happening, it's a fairly narrow escape.

How many people would that be? At a guess, since it was rush hour on a weekday, the trains would have been full. A quick look at Wikipedia tells me a tube train has a capacity of 914.

How many trains? Within 10 minutes beforehand, let's say 4 trains per line.

Three lines bombed

914 x 4 x 3 = 10,968

That's not counting the bus, of course, and you've already got 11,000 people who I think it's fair to say had a narrow escape.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:01, closed)

See the update I'm about to make...

( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:02, closed)

Pffft
You should change your name to "pwnd".
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:10, closed)

Not really.
Granted that there is a large number who can claim with some validity to have had a narrow escape, I still have a hunch that there's a significant amount of... um... "creative memory"...

StR is correct to point out that the parameters of "narrow escape" are very unclear, and that point is wholly compatible with FSS' reply ^up there^ - to which I'm pretty sympathetic.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:19, closed)

That too.
Human memory, not so much either. Never mind deliberately exaggerating.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:29, closed)

I agree with you
Was just trying to make that point about what a 'narrow escape' means, really. For me, with 7/7. I definitely FELT like it was a narrow escape, but as that bit of maths up there shows, I'm well aware that actually, as FSS points out further down, it needs to be a pretty loose definition of 'narrow' to really be true.
(SnowyTheWereRabbit the Leporid from Hell, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:35, closed)

^What she said

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:40, closed)

Oh yes, very good.
Nice use of statistics.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:12, closed)

Plus (or rather times)...
...multiply that by the number of people who are on B3TA, also rather a lot (especially those who live or work in That London).

Then multiply that by the number of different ways you can define "near miss", I'm not that surprised by the number of people who "nearly" ended up in a highly public disaster.

And we have a number of disasters to choose from. My nearest involvement is that my Dad went through Kings Cross the day before the horrific fire. But then so did 100,000 other people and that's just one of the 100-or-so people I know personally. And he wasn't anywhere near 7/7, the Twin Towers, the announcement of a second series of Deal or No Deal, etc.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:11, closed)

It's the number of ways you could define "near miss" that's crucial here.
So, yeah.

Some of the near misses of which I've heard over the years have not, I'd say, been all that near at all.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:22, closed)

I agree
I travelled to and from work in London by public transport that day* so I could technically claim it was a "near miss" but of course it was actually a very distant miss.

I'm tired of people embellishing weak stories of a coincidental interaction with something that was later involved in a disaster. However, given their apparent appreciation of statistics, they're probably also big fans of the Lottery.

*I travelled home a lot later than usual on the 7th July as I did the same as lots of other Londoners that day: met friends in a pub, shared concerns and sympathies and then got incredibly drunk.
( sanityclause is waiting until, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 14:29, closed)

Yes, but.
If you go to ten minutes, you can probably stretch to 15 without much effort, because one might easily be delayed by that much just by queuing for coffe a bit too long. Adding another 50% to your figures.

And rush hour trains will be over-capacity, with people crammed in every inch. Let's say another 10%.

And then of course, by the same definition, the people who got the trains in the same time period before the bombings had the same narrow escape. Double the figures.

36,000 or so people, which, let's be honest, doesn't exactly make it breaking news to be part of that group. This 'narrow escape' is going to have to be pretty wide to fit that many people into it. And that's just one incident.
(Falstaff's Spiritual Successor, Fri 20 Aug 2010, 11:22, closed)