A bad omen, City hall is flooded

A bad omen for the London Assembly and Mayoral elections on Thursday.

Who would have thought it but City Hall, home to the Greater London Authority is flooded due to a burst watermain in Tooley Street, SE1. It has affected the City Hall's IT networks, including email and telephone services. The building has been closed to the staff and visitors since Monday and it's unclear when it will be re-opened. Whoever is declared London's Mayor on Friday certainly won't have a building to swan into.

Meetings about the count are having to be relocated in different parts of London. With communications down it's difficult to get hold of anybody at the moment so we are still not sure what's going to happen about the final Assembly members and Mayoral declaration on Friday which was to be held in City Hall's basement.

London Elects claim "they were looking at contingency plans". Doubt they had any existing contingency plans in place because nobody expected it to happen. Suspect it's a matter of panic measures.

The annoying thing is that there seems to be a media blackout. Or maybe it's just on the back burner for now. The counting of votes for the election on Thursday will take place as planned at Excel, Alexandra Palace and London's Olympia but they need to set up their IT equipment to be able to download the information centrally before the final correlation and declaration. It is bound to cause some speculation about possible irregularities if they are not more transparent about the whole issue. We would have expected news updates at least on the London regional TV news bulletins.

Well I've got my observation assignment for Friday morning and wherever they end up later I'll be there. Now all I've got to do is sort out my clobber.