Explosion!

You might have heard it in the news about 10 days ago: there was a giant explosion in midtown Manhattan. In that weird self-connection thing, I did go through that area about an hour before it happened, since the route home took me by those subway stations. Anyway, it turns out that an old pipe carrying steam collected too much cold water and managed to explode. (If you want to know the physics of it, Toby figured it out.) The damage is pretty phenomenal! I thought I'd share the photos I saw on the gothamist.com in case you missed the news. I've been avoiding the area since there are still street closures, making an already-crowded area even more crowded!

The exposion occured around 6pm, so it was rush-hour, meaning tonnes of people were around to take camera-phone photos of the rising cloud of steam. It was a humid day, making the steam cloud even more impressive!



A tow-truck was swallowed up by the hole in the road. From what I've read, the driver has severe burns to most of his body.


A few days after the explosion, and much of the area has been tested (there were fears of asbestos in the air), and cleaned up. The tow-truck remains in this photo.