Each week, Ben Hopkinson looks back at a serious, crazy, and happy news story from the past week.
Serious News
Monday saw a power failure create major disruption across the Tube and Overground services – and the Watchdog London TravelWatch (LTW) have said that TfL did not do much to give updates in real time across social media.
The website crashed and social media feeds were out of date as journeys could not be completed as The Elizabeth, Bakerloo, Jubilee and Northern lines were some of those disrupted.
In a statement, LTW said: “While incidents such as these are unpredictable, it was disappointing to see the lack of information and updates on TfL's own social media feeds. We accept that incidents like this can occur but do expect TfL to do much better when it comes to communicating with the millions of people who are reliant on their services. Directing all passengers to their website is not practical if the site then crashes”.
The cause was initially due to a fault on National Grid's transmission network at around 2:30pm in South-West London which then spiralled out across the network.
Crazy News
An offending speed limit breaker has been identified in central Switzerland – as a duck.
The mallard has been clocked flying 52km/h (32mph) in a zone with a limit of 30km/h (18.6mph).
Officers were assessing images from last month, Sunday 13th April. It marks the second time this has happened by a duck on the same date and location but instead back in 2018.
It is extremely coincidental – and police hope that the public will be able to enjoy the “curious coincidences” of both cases.
Happy News
A man walked from London to Brighton without sitting down once and wants his effort to encourage people to talk about their mental health, while also believing in themselves too.
Bhupinder Sandhu, who works as a mindfulness coach in Gravesend has previously raised money for the Mind charity as he trekked from both London to Wales and London to Edinburgh.
His latest endeavour saw him depart Trafalgar Square at 8pm on 19th April and walk continuously for 62 miles to Brighton Palace Pier which he arrived 21 hours later at 5pm.
Speaking of the feat, Sandhu says: “People do stop me when I'm walking and we talk about mental health, so it's good to see. One thing I want is for people to talk about their mental health problems, but people are scared”.
His next route is to walk the entirety of the Thames Path at 185 miles as part of his “Million Step May”, before he will walk from London to Paris in August – again for the Mind charity.
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