representatives of the city. also a team has been in communication with the victims and the families and will continue to work with them as we move towards opening the area of boston for our public once again. i just want to say to my team behind me, thank you. you re doing a great job. last week or so all the agencies, and since friday, been working overtime making sure we have a plan that works to re-establish boylston street in the city of boston. i ll have rene who s working on all the plans. thank you. thank you, mayor. good afternoon. the city has been working the restoration an re-entry strategy for the copley area since last wednesday. a team comprised of the boston athletic association and city agencies, including public
enforcement deeply suspicious that this was not sort of an accidental event, some sort of gas explosion or water pipe explosion, but that it was actually intentionally set. and so they re going to comb through that pretty deliberately to try and figure that out. but i will tell you at first blush, to those in the community, it looks like it was, in fact, a bombing. and, fran, we re told that other cities are going on heightened alert. you heard from jessica yellin our senior white house correspondent saying the white house is in something of a lockdown mode. is this just protocol? it is protocol, jake. we know places like from the east africa embassy bombings, you had one in kenya and one in tanzania. it s not infrequent if this was a planned, premeditated attack that it would be not only in boston. so the right thing to do from a preparation standpoint is to go to a heightened state of security until you can have a better sense of what the cause and what the motivation was. if y
give a press conference, giving more information about what they know. we re expecting that presses conference in roughly three minutes, and we will bring that of course to you live. tom foreman is here to tell us more about the incident and the event itself. tom? sure, jake. as you know, this is not just any big sporting event. for the world s runners, this is the big sporting event of the year. it s extraordinary. the route starts out here in hopkinton. it gets more and more dense as it works its way into boston. as we move toward the finish line, i ll stop it part way in here so you see landmarks, which i know john over here is well acquainted with. as you move in, you re going past fenway park over here, the massachusetts institute of technology over in here, boston college, boston university. so lot of places passing here. right now what police have been telling runners to do, this is mass ave cutting right through here. they re telling the runners on this side of mass ave to ke
people he was seeing injured in boston. want to play with you a moment of what the vice president had to say. as i m speaking here, they just turned on the television in my office, and apparently there has been a bombing. i don t know any of the details, of what caused it, who did it. i don t think it exists yet. but our prir prayers are with people in boston who have suffered injury. i don t know how many there are. i m looking at it on television now. reporter: meaningful that he did use the word bombing. again, we don t have confirmation explicitly from white house officials but i would say the vice president pretty senior official calling this a bombing, jake. i continue to stay in contact with officials and we ll bring you any detailed information either about the president s contact with officials there or further details about boston. jake? jessica yellin at the white house. we ll come back to you in a bit. if you re just tuning in, just to catch you up, shortly over an
let s move into the finish line and talk about what was happening there. we were talking about the crowds that were in there. s best we can map this out, this is where the finish line occurs. you can see it marked here. this is where the first explosion occurred, right in this area. when you watch that video we saw a short while ago, you can see the second one is just down the road here. we re not real sure of the distance, but it happens in very, very short order. i m going to bring in a street view so you get a better look at what it s like. if you were standing at the finish line when this happened, this is exactly where you would be. you have an idea of what s around it, the general setting you re in. this is a very, very popular and very dense part of boston on any day. but on marathon day it s a huge, huge event. in fact, i have a friend about two miles short of the finish line when this happened so this is just a mammoth event. and when we widen this out once again, i ll exit th