Huge explosion in Oslo

[kenoma]

22 february 1933 The begining of the Third reich.

...

Weird huh?

Weird that you would try to rewrite the historical record to liven up an otherwise fruitless wiki-binge.

But it sounds like you're having fun, so carry on.

[Harvey]

22 february 1933 The begining of the Third reich.

...

Weird huh?

Weird that you would try to rewrite the historical record to liven up an otherwise fruitless wiki-binge.

But it sounds like you're having fun, so carry on.

No I didn't mean that sorry typo. At the begining of etc...

I know it's all a complete flight of fantasy, but there was that story last year in Wired magazineU.S. Spies Want to Find Terrorists in World of Warcraft.

Games within games. I just thought I'd play the game for a while and see where it leads.

[vanlose kid]

The first police patrols began crossing Lake Tyrifjorden at 6.03pm, arriving on the island at 6.25pm.

Let's see, 22 min. to travel 1,600 feet = 0.303030303 miles / 22 min / 60 min per hour = 0.82644628 miles per hour.

0.83 mph. I guess in the fog of war they forgot to bring the inflatable raft paddle?

Maybe they were swimming.

according to this:

http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/oslo ... repene.php

and this (scroll about halfway down):

http://www.dagbladet.no/

the po-po don't get on a boat until 08:09 at the earliest. so, packing, unloading, time in transit, almost sinking, choosing a safe landing place, in all took 16 minutes. no, i don't think they just powered over there on open water (people were being shot in the water) not knowing how many gunmen were there and where they might be (at this time the reported number of possible dead was 10). i'm of course assuming the po-po were not that stupid, or at least not as brave as some of the arm-chair generals here at RI battle planning after the fact.

my failing seems to be that when i think of police i think The Wire and not S.W.A.TTM.

edit: sorry Joe, didn't detect whatever it is i didn't detect.

*

[Joe Hillshoist]

Coming from a similar-sized Northern European country as Norway, with only one dedicated national "heavy weapons"/"anti-terror" police unit, I see the events and the timetable of the Norwegian police response more or less plausible.

Sorry, but I don't buy that you decide not to send the closest cops when you have multiple reports of a single gunman slaughtering a bunch of kids. That is simply not plausible in any way, shape or form.

Wait a minute - where did the reports of two gunmen come from then? Did they start before the guy was busted/stopped?

as of Saturday, the Norwegian police said they weren't ruling out the possibility of multiple shooters. I believe it was a Guardian article I had read.

Ok.

One issue I have with people expecting the timeline to be quicker. If they don't know know how many shooters there are do you expect them to go rushing in like the guy in the Shining who got an axe in the gut?

There is also this thing - snafu - and it means situation normal all fucked up, and refers to the way stuff goes pear shaped in chaotic situations and small probelems have a tendency to start cascading problems. Thats not to say "incompetence rules", it means that whatever people think will take 10 minutes is probably gonna take 15. It means some dickhead is going to overload a boat witrh too many people and too much gear, someone else is gonna forget their radio and someone else hasn't charged them properly to begin cos they were on the piss the other night.

So while there is potential for this situation to have been exacerbated by people aiding the gunman's cause with tiny inputs at crucial times, there is also a chance this didn't happen.

Its not set in stone.

Secondly every disaster I can think of has a situation where the casualty count rises, and continues to rise, then drops after time. The easier is to control the "disaster area" and account for everyone in it the quicker an accurate count is established.

This happens, and happens alot.

In Victoria after the black saturday fires the body count was still dropping after months as DNA testing identified bodies that were thought to be human as belonging to domestic or wild animals.

That doesn't mean the body count dropping is in itself legit. But it (overestimates on casualty number) happens all the time and people here are acting like it doesn't.

You're also expecting

a/ cops to be competent

b/ everyone else involved to be competent too.

This isn't always a safe assumption.

There is plenty about this to be sus on. And we're talking about a place with a history of organised terror in the service of a strategy of tension. So the default posiution is that everything should be examined carefully. But imo one set of assumptions is as bad as another.

[semper occultus]

7/7 Phone network performance examined and explained

Submitted by Webmaster01 on Wed, 03/04/2009 - 08:23

www.continuityforum.org

Following the explosions on the morning of 7th July hundreds of thousands of people used their mobile phones to contact their families and work colleagues. Mobile networks are designed to cope with significant peaks in volumes of calls, and a safety margin is also built in so that even major events do not overload the system. Call volumes on 7th July far exceeded normal levels, and the O2 network alone carried 67% more voice traffic in central London than normal, while text message volumes increased by 20% on the day across the whole country.

The O2 network was not damaged by the attacks and we took steps to manage the demand. The large number of calls did mean that there was network congestion in parts of London, but most customers were able to make calls after several attempts.

Actions taken

Let us consider the equivalent situation on a motorway. Normally the traffic flows freely, and vehicles are able to move at will. Occasionally however, an accident, a breakdown or bad weather cause the traffic to slow down and congestion inevitably follows. Mostly this is short-lived and the situation recovers quickly, but sometimes the incident is more serious and the congestion lasts much longer.

When this happens, the Police have a number of options open to them in order not only to reduce congestion at the point of the incident but also to keep further traffic from entering the motorway and exacerbating the problem.

In much the same way, mobile network operators have a number of call traffic management options open to them. For example we can make network changes in the immediate area of the incident which will normally remove localised congestion quite quickly, and we can restrict additional call traffic from entering the system which reduces the load on the network, especially the gateways between the fixed and mobile networks.

These controls were used on the 7th July by all network operators, with the intention of preserving the integrity of the networks while still allowing as much traffic to flow as possible, but the situation was complicated by having four major incidents confined in a fairly small geographical area. This inevitably resulted in some customers experiencing the busy signal when attempting to make a call.

Those people who were unable to make voice calls turned to text messaging and again, inevitably, the text messaging systems became congested, delaying the time it took for a message to be delivered.

Industry working together

Co-operation among the fixed and mobile networks is the key to an effective response to a major incident. The telecoms industry runs a tripartite forum consisting of fixed and mobile network operators, the industry regulator Ofcom and various areas of central government – which comes together on a conference bridge on such occasions, with the objective of maintaining the integrity of the Critical National Infrastructure.

This forum was convened several times during 7th July, and the spirit of co-operation which it encouraged ensured that all operators worked together to minimise the impact on emergency responders as well as the public at large.

Emergency restrictions

Just before noon, the Police requested that O2 should apply a set of network access restrictions known as Access Overload Control or ACCOLC in a 1 kilometre area around Aldgate. This facility makes the network in the immediate area unavailable to the public at large, but permits a pre-agreed list of emergency responders to use the network in order to
save lives and protect the infrastructure.

The facility was removed later in the afternoon, but during that time, the O2 network would have been unavailable for all normal calls (with the exception of emergency calls to 112 and 999) within a kilometre or so of Aldgate station.

Recommendations

Should events be repeated, there are a number of steps which individuals and businesses can take in order to improve the situation.

• Encourage staff and individuals who might be in the affected area to call from their mobiles to a fixed line number rather than calling from fixed lines to mobiles – this is less onerous on the networks and relieves congestion.

• Keep calls as short as possible – once you have established that an individual is safe, clear the call so that others can do the same.

• Arrange a central 0800 number to which members of staff can call which will provide information regarding the incident and advice or instructions to staff.

We would like to thank David Sutton, Network Continuity & Restoration Manager for O2 (UK) Limited for this piece.

END

[Nordic]

The Unthinkable is difficult to prepare for.

Because nobody's thought of it.

When someone commits Unthinkable acts, they usually get pretty damn far before anyone stops them.

Kind of just how it is.

[stickdog99]

Survivors who heard the shots reported that they had thought a shooting contest was being held as part of the activities, and thought nothing of it til they saw the gunman.

Those crazy Marxist kids and their shooting and screaming contests! Yep. And it was no surprise Wellstone's plane crashed in that freezing rain, either, right?

I'd have run my ass off and tried to hide as quietly as possible before that fucker blew my head off, that's what I'd have done.

So you would not have called 911 from your hiding place if you thought nobody was around? Come on. There were hundreds of kids there. They guy couldn't have cornered them all at once.

You are really reaching here. You actually believe that nobody had dialed 911 twenty minutes into this guy's shooting spree?

[stickdog99]

The Unthinkable is difficult to prepare for.

Because nobody's thought of it.

When someone commits Unthinkable acts, they usually get pretty damn far before anyone stops them.

Kind of just how it is.

Yep. Nobody ever thinks of calling 911 in an emergency.

[Nordic]

The Unthinkable is difficult to prepare for.

Because nobody's thought of it.

When someone commits Unthinkable acts, they usually get pretty damn far before anyone stops them.

Kind of just how it is.

Yep. Nobody ever thinks of calling 911 in an emergency.

Now you're just being a dick.

Do you remember when the Tahir Square thing was going on? Remember how we'd read one thing in the American and English press, then Alice would get on here and tell us what was REALLY going on?

Why are you believing every little detail of what the English speaking press is telling you about this stuff? The details could be wildly wrong. It's translated, who knows how many people it has gone through, it's like playing Operator.

Just relax, Jesus Christ.

While it's good to study this stuff as it comes out, so many people are jumping to idiotic conclusions about things they actually don't know JACK SHIT about.

[Nordic]

A Norwegian facebook friend just posted this.

I can't read Norwegian, but I don't need to.

Photos of some kind of massive Memorial Service.

Great photos, but might make you cry. You've been warned.

Click on the first photo and it will start showing you more.

http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks ... 183812.ece

[stickdog99]

According to the current official timeline, it took 97 minutes for the killer to go from placing a bomb in Oslo to killing kids on the island and he took the ferry!

Nobody's suggesting he lit a fuse under the car.

The timeline is:

15:20: A witness observes what he describes as a suspicious-looking man leaving Regjeringskvartalet (the Government quarter), in downtown Oslo.[8]

15:22: A bomb placed in a Volkswagen Crafter goes off in Grubbegata, near the offices of the Prime Minister, and several other governmental buildings.[9]

Again WTF is up with all the apologists for the cops taking 78 minutes to get the damn island with little kids getting shot all the while?

[stickdog99]

Now you're just being a dick.

Do you remember when the Tahir Square thing was going on? Remember how we'd read one thing in the American and English press, then Alice would get on here and tell us what was REALLY going on?

Why are you believing every little detail of what the English speaking press is telling you about this stuff? The details could be wildly wrong. It's translated, who knows how many people it has gone through, it's like playing Operator.

Just relax, Jesus Christ.

While it's good to study this stuff as it comes out, so many people are jumping to idiotic conclusions about things they actually don't know JACK SHIT about.

The cops took forever and a day to get to the scene of the crime, and many people there are rightfully pissed off about it. Sorry, but I have a hard time believing that these facts were somehow lost in translation.

[Nordic]

According to the current official timeline, it took 97 minutes for the killer to go from placing a bomb in Oslo to killing kids on the island and he took the ferry!

Nobody's suggesting he lit a fuse under the car.

The timeline is:

15:20: A witness observes what he describes as a suspicious-looking man leaving Regjeringskvartalet (the Government quarter), in downtown Oslo.[8]

15:22: A bomb placed in a Volkswagen Crafter goes off in Grubbegata, near the offices of the Prime Minister, and several other governmental buildings.[9]

Again WTF is up with all the apologists for the cops taking 78 minutes to get the damn island with little kids getting shot all the while?

Dude, this is what you do ALL THE TIME. You think that people who might think that things are getting lost in translation, or that the media might not have all the details down pat, are "APOLOGISTS FOR THE COPS".

That's a disgusting and insulting attitude and it shows a significant lack of intelligence.

You were doing it in the Peak Oil thread, too. It's pathological on your part.

[stickdog99]

One issue I have with people expecting the timeline to be quicker. If they don't know know how many shooters there are do you expect them to go rushing in like the guy in the Shining who got an axe in the gut?

No, that's Scatman Crother's job. Their job is to sit on their hands while little kids get shot to the head.

[stickdog99]

According to the current official timeline, it took 97 minutes for the killer to go from placing a bomb in Oslo to killing kids on the island and he took the ferry!

Nobody's suggesting he lit a fuse under the car.

The timeline is:

15:20: A witness observes what he describes as a suspicious-looking man leaving Regjeringskvartalet (the Government quarter), in downtown Oslo.[8]

15:22: A bomb placed in a Volkswagen Crafter goes off in Grubbegata, near the offices of the Prime Minister, and several other governmental buildings.[9]

Again WTF is up with all the apologists for the cops taking 78 minutes to get the damn island with little kids getting shot all the while?

Dude, this is what you do ALL THE TIME. You think that people who might think that things are getting lost in translation, or that the media might not have all the details down pat, are "APOLOGISTS FOR THE COPS".

What should I call people defending the cops for taking 78 minutes to get the scene of the crime?