The activists have been underground since Tuesday night in a network of tunnels dug over several months beneath Euston Square. They are protesting against the construction of HS2, the high-speed rail link that, if constructed, will come into Euston station.
Accusations and counter-accusations are flying between the protesters and the HS2 eviction team. The activists say HS2’s eviction techniques are putting their lives at risk while HS2 blames the protesters and the way the tunnel has been constructed for putting their own lives at risk.
Larch Maxey, one of the activists in the tunnel, said: “HS2 are endangering our lives yet again. They need to help us make the tunnel safe. They have made this an urgent situation. We haven’t got the air supply.” He said the eviction team were preventing the tunnellers from clearing soil and water from the tunnel, which was making it very dangerous.
They’ve got to help you disrupt their own plans? Rilly?
Sadly I have to admit Gazan terrorists do this tunnel business much better. HS2 should ask Israelis for advice how to deal with the situation.
You know who else needs air? Lions.
Just saying.
(Even though I would lean towards rabid hyenas in this case. Personal choice and all that I suppose)
Smothing doesn’t add up:
“From my experience I would say the eviction is the most dangerous part of the process. The eviction team will probably be pumping oxygen into the tunnels, but as this air is dry it dries out the tunnel walls. The Cakehole tunnels at Manchester airport stood for nearly five months without any problems before the evictions, but after only a week of trying to get people out the walls started cracking and there was a partial cave in.”
So they are pumping oxygen in.
Difficult to have plausible deniability for lions (or phosgene). But who would be the least bit surprised at the arrival of a plague of rats?
NDReader January 30, 2021 at 9:00 am – “Difficult to have plausible deniability for lions (or phosgene). But who would be the least bit surprised at the arrival of a plague of rats?”
I am not suggesting anything in particular, but I note, hypothetically, that nitrogen is painless. Also it is very hard to detect in an autopsy.
Not that I am not suggesting anything in particular either.
Just ensure that the rats have been starved for a few days.
Sod off (again) Swampy
(Mind you looking at his Wiki page it seems there’s hardly been a protest over the last quarter century where the fecker hasn’t joined in).
WTF were these clowns allowed to dig tunnels under Euston Square? This is Central London, FFS! You can’t do anything round there before you’ll have some jobsworth on your case. If you’d sat down on the grass with a take-away coffee & a ham roll you’d have one of the Met’s uniformed thugs handing you a fixed penalty & threatening you with the Terrorist Prevention Act for arguing, before you’d finished squeezing the mustard sachet.
Just collapse the entire tunnel on them. Swampies gone and HS2 with it. What’s not to like?
No comments at the DT on this story (same with the story about migrants setting fire to Napier Barracks). The DT obviously don’t want highly liked, non-PC comments along the lines of “collapse the tunnels and let the scumbags die”.
Surely the real problem here is that not enough soil is falling into the tunnels..?
Time for a flood
How high is the water table in that area?
Question is– which is the lesser evil?
Swampy and the gang are useless leftist eco-shite to be sure.
But so is the Johnson crew .Swampy doesn’t come with a multi-trillion price tag and –also unlike Blojob BlueMarxist–isn’t within a million miles of ruining the UK economically and as a free-ish country.
So long may the tunnelers cause HS2 the maximum possible damage.
Best outcome, tunnels collapse and the area declared a crime scene.
“Build fewer roads and more environmentally friendly railways!”
Government builds a new railway (we can agree or disagree whether it is a good investment)
“This is an outrage! Stop it!”
When Murphy lobbies for pork to fund ‘infrastructure’, everyone knows that any actual ‘infrastructure’ will always be opposed.
‘You can’t do anything round there before you’ll have some jobsworth on your case.’
As Banksy is reputed to have claimed, never underestimate the power of a hi-vis vest and hardhat in getting away with stuff like this
WTF were these clowns allowed to dig tunnels under Euston Square?
That was my first thought. Did Plod let them get away with it, or somehow miss giant molehills in Euston Square? Neither situation is encouraging…
I’m also having trouble deciding whether I hate grubby hippies or pointless £200 billion railways most. Perhaps the solution would be to collapse the tunnels on top of Swampy et al, then cancel HS2 in recognition of their sacrifice.
Rob,
““Build fewer roads and more environmentally friendly railways!”
Government builds a new railway (we can agree or disagree whether it is a good investment)
“This is an outrage! Stop it!””
I’m not sure that was ever Swampy’s thing. It was more about the woodland.
And this is where environmentalism gets in a pickle. That woodland gets in the way of housing, and if you move people closer to town, you get less CO2 from their daily commute.
Also, I’m not confident at this point that HS2 will have any environmental savings. Work from home is going to hit commutes so hard (especially further out from London), there’s not going to be a shortage of capacity on the existing lines.
You want to get them out of the tunnels without injury? Simple. Put a number of speakers near the entrances and play Frankie Vaughan’s song “Tower of Strength”, very loudly, on a continuous loop (unable to show attachment on this Kindle). I’ll give them 24 hours at the most.
Without looking into it, they might’ve started tunnelling from a cellar in one of those old houses (Georgian?). They probably had a map of gas pipes and leccy cables. I find this fascinating, I remember a book perhaps also made into a film, where POW’s dig a tunnel which starts under those gymnastic horses. Yep, read it in the 70’s, Finnish translation of Eric Williams’ The Wooden Horse (1949). Great book, I should revisit it in its original language.
This attitude is normal. I’m sure you’ve noticed the endless howls about how illegal immigrants aren’t helped and paid and pampered.
“HS2, the high-speed rail link that, if constructed, will come into Euston station.”
Really? I thought that that idea had been abandoned and that it will come into somewhere obscure in NW London.
“Jussi
I remember a book perhaps also made into a film,”
It was indeed made into a film. You can watch it here
https://www.military-stuff.org/the-wooden-horse-1950-full-film/
@ Jussi
I confess, though, that the story I thought of when reading this news was ‘Quatermass and the Pit’.
Both a 6 part TV series and subsequent film, Which, for its time (1967), was really good and genuinely scary.
Excavations in the London underground tunnels find a crashed spaceship. Bad things follow.
I hope Swampy and co know they’re in it for the long haul. AFAIK the line stops somewhere in Wormwood Scrubs and the Euston extension is scheduled to be laid some time after we have got to carbon neutral.
They’ll be demanding maternity wards next.
I agree 100% with AndrewC about the quality of the Quatermass film and series. A definite case of less being more.
On a similar note I recall an excellent Nigel Kneale play called The Stone Tape which was broadcasted almost 50 years ago.
Sorry – I meant to type another Nigel Kneale play as, of course, he was the writer of Quatermass.
David Tomlinson was in The Wooden Horse, also Mary Poppins and Bednobs and Broomsticks.
The water table in Euston Square must be about 1 foot underground, the whole area is a mass of river channels and streams that got incorporated into the sewer system. A few more days like today and they will be flooded out and packed off to the Savoy at taxpayers’ expense
Isn’t this how we got Morlocks?
“Diogenes
Bednobs and Broomsticks”
The football match in Bedknobs and Broomsticks was far more realistic than the one in Escape to Victory.
They had lions too
Also don’t forget the Goon Show, Quatermass OBE:
This skull is 5 million years old!
[Sings] Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.
@Rob
You can build as many roads as you like as long as the intention is to make them turnpikes.
Compare and contrast the Newbury bypass or Twyford down (while ago for all you youngters) with 27 or so miles of toll M6.
Two things.
1) Industrial quantities of expanding foam?
2) Why were Plod not down there beating up women and enforcing muzzle wearing or is that only enforced on the non left?