Australian survivors Tania Calabrese and Tony Cancellar.
Posted on 07/09/2005 5:16:11 PM PDT by aculeus
The Sydney couple who survived the London bus bomb have spoken of the horrors they experienced in the immediate aftermath of Thursday's terrorist attack.
Australians Tania Calabrese, 29, and Tony Cancellara, 34, were sitting on the top deck of a No. 30 bus when it exploded near Tavistock Square in London.
Calabrese, from Five Dock, held onto the seat in front as the bus collapsed around her and debris flew through the air. Her boyfriend, Cancellara, from Leichhardt, was thrown through the air by the blast and knocked unconscious.
Calabrese described horrific scenes surrounding the bus as she searched the street for her boyfriend.
"I only realised Tony wasn't next to me when I got off the bus," she said. "I was walking around and then I saw all the dead people everywhere. Then I started freaking out and . . . realised that he wasn't there.
"I went around the back of the bus. He wasn't there but there were people all over the road. There were bits of bodies. Arms. Legs. People with no heads. There was one person who was just a torso. I don't know if they were male or female. AdvertisementAdvertisement
"There were people with missing legs, pieces of body chunks with clothes on them, people hanging from the top of the back of the bus with bits of clothes hanging off them. They were not alive. No way.
"I saw a man who was a puddle. I don't know how that can happen to someone. We have been trying to figure out how someone can end up like that. We could see that he was once human. We could see hair and skin and clothes. I think that he must have been at the back of the bus. He landed right next to a girl."
Early reports said two people died from the bus bomb, but Calabrese said the toll must be higher.
"There is no way only two people were killed on the bus," she said. "I saw more than two people dead. I saw them all on the floor."
The couple were sitting in the middle of the top deck of the bus, opposite the stairs, travelling from their west London home to work in the city, when the explosion occurred.
Calabrese said she had no idea the bus had been bombed and initially thought they had been involved in a traffic accident.
"I don't remember a bang," she said. "I didn't hear anything. It was just like a violent shaking. It felt like a really bad car accident. I thought something had hit us from behind.
"Then the shaking was uncontrollable. I couldn't control my eyes. As soon as I felt the impact blood flew out of my nose metres in front of me.
"I remember grabbing on to the railing in front of me while the bus was shaking. I was thinking, 'OK, this is going to stop', but then I could hear creaking metal and the floor around my seat started falling down.
"I just held on to the chair in front of me. The floor started slowly twisting and I ended up not that high off the ground. I couldn't walk down the stairs because the bus was flattened. I just jumped off.
"I landed on the floor and looked around. It was so quiet it was freaky. There was something like smog all around but it was actually fibres from the seats so there was like dust everywhere and black smoke.
"It was really quiet and there were people lying all over the floor. There were people with cuts on their faces and everyone had nosebleeds. I was holding on to my face as well."
Realising that a catastrophic event had occurred, Calabrese searched the surrounding area for her boyfriend.
"I don't know how long it took to find Tony. It seemed like forever but it might have only been two minutes," she said. "I was screaming and calling out his name. I went back to the bus. I didn't know what was going on. I was just walking around looking at everything in a daze.
"I finally saw him on the road from a distance. When I got to him, his eyes were flickering and his body was convulsing. His head was in a puddle of blood. He looked like he was in one piece but he was completely out of it.
"I was screaming for him to wake up and then a man showed up. I screamed 'Please help me. This is my partner!' The man leant down with me to help Tony and then I freaked out and for some reason I decided I had to look for my handbag. I went running around and came back without it and then Tony started to wake up.
"There were a lot of people who were walking around helping people and some people were getting up from the ground. It didn't look like anyone on the floor was all right, but if they were they were getting up themselves.
"It was really quiet but maybe that was because I was deafened by the blast. I couldn't hear anything except screams. All my clothes were ripped and the hem on my pants was blown off by the blast as well as the buckles on my shoes. My jacket was ripped everywhere and my scarf had blood all over it.
"They put us in an ambulance because they were worried about Tony's back and head. They wrapped him in padding and put him on a stretcher and took us to hospital."
Australian survivors Tania Calabrese and Tony Cancellar.
Hey Muslim, I'm talking to you!
Coming soon to you and yours: Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hiroshima and (not or) Nagasaki.
It's your choice: kill your cancer or we shall kill you and all your relatives.
DITTO!!!
IslamoFascism will be utterly annihilated!!!
"Hey Muslim, I'm talking to you!
Coming soon to you and yours: Dresden, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Hiroshima and (not or) Nagasaki.
It's your choice: kill your cancer or we shall kill you and all your relatives."(aculeus)
Worth a repeat. Wish it would happen sooner, the time has come!
sad...but no different then 9-11.
My buddy was walking out of the south tower when the second plane hit...he turn and ran for his life...he said besides the glass and other stuff falling around him it was "raining body parts"...and most of these parts were in flames.
He told us this two weeks later tailgating at a Jets game and had to compose himself several times so as not to cry.
I remember watching video of firemen shot from inside one of the WTC towers. You kept hearing thuds. The firemen looked at each other periodically, knowing that the thuds were bodies landing on the mezzanine roof.
See, the PC crap is crap, and someone ought to make some very unPC toilet paper. I'd buy it all the time, and send it to relatives.
To the boys in Iraq & Aghanistan: get'em all.
Problem is, while our boys and girls are over there, there may be many of them among us here. V's wife.
Little more will be done about the threat of Islam.
Almost all that is going to be done has been done.
The world is too PC for anything more to be done.
New York, Washington, Madrid, Beslan, London.
No attack is outrageous or barbaric or savage enough to awaken the survival instinct in the sad, weak, pathetic remnant of Western Civilization.
Once Bush's and Blair's terms are over, they will be replaced by one-world crybabies. the West will hunker down in a corner saying, "Please don't hit me again," to the barbaric supplicants of the satanic moon god.
All the Western leaders will sound and act like Neville Chamberlain.
Most of them already do.
Ultimately, the West will capitulate to the Islamic onslaught.
The bravado expressed in this forum is little more than vain noise.
No one is listening.
Not your president.
Not your congressional delegations.
No one.
Because, if they really, really, REALLY meant to prosecute a War on Terror, the borders would be sealed, sermons in Mosques would be attended by FBI agents and their interpreters, seditious statements would be prosecuted to the FULLEST extent of the law, and there would be thousands upon thousands of foreign Islamic activists rounded up and shipped back on cargo jets to the hell holes out of which they crawled.
Oh, one more thing.
If they really, really, REALLY, REAALLY meant to prosecute a War on Terror, every outrage would be met with a response many orders of magnitude greater than that perpetrated by the Islamic savages.
You are right.
You forgot Moscow.
Wanna bet this graphic account will not make it in the American media. It might remind folks about those forced to jump from the Trade Centers.
Sadly I agree....the ME should still be smoldering in ashes from the bombs that began dropping 9/12/01
The bastards. Payback is a bitch though. Prepare for a well-deserved 'backlash'.
You're quite right. Nothing much will be done as long as we have the current ruling class in charge.
Exactly! Enough of this PC garbage, civilized societies need to hunt down those savages, or we will be destroyed!
Oh, yes, I'm sure this will be deemed "too graphic" by the MSM.
The truth is never "too graphic."
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