Thursday, July 19, 2007

Massive Steam Explosion in Midtown Manhatten

I was in Pfizer office 150 east, 42nd street at the 36th floor. It was around 6 when we heard a huge sound. Owing to the rains in the morning we thought that it was some thunderstorm. It was continous for several minutes and i went to look out through the window. Then saw some huge smoke rising up the air till our floor and it was not quite clear what had happened. I thought that the next building got fire may be. Immediately my client panicked and said take things and run immediately. Within few secs we got the fire alarm in the building asking us to evacuate it as soon as possible. Have gone through this fire alarm exercise couple of times and this time it was real :). Oh man, climbing down 36 floors on the staircase is not that easy. Not knowing what acutally happened everyone started rushing down. It almost took 10-12 mins to climb down. The moment we came out of exit i just looked back to see a huge volcano kind of explosion from the middle of road. I was very close to it, you should have seen the force with which it was pushing things out. My Collegue VijayBaskar was really frightened being his first trip. [There was another adventurous incident while we travelled from chennai to newark. The flight got cancelled in Geneva and we had stay one night there. Will write a seperate blog on that]


Then came to know after some time that the reason was due to an explosion of a 24 inch steam pipe underneath which carries steam, mainly to the Empire State Building for the hot conditioning in winter. As per the latest news (writing this down around 2.45 am in new york, helmsley hotel, 33rd floor) one person confirmed dead and around 20 were injured. I dint see any victim in my own eyes except for few guys with lot of sand, dust, water spilled all over their dresses.




Take a look at this video.









Other links


4 comments:

Ponnarasi Kothandaraman said...

Scary! :O Good that you are safe.

Natarajan Sundaram said...

hello brother,

that was really a great adventure to keep in mind.
first i thought u r explaining some action cuts of ur new story, then only i understood the seriousness. hmm...! come home safely man.

Natarajan Sundaram said...

one more thing. i have changed my blogname to http://i-am-the-legend.blogspot.com
so keep the changed id in ur page.
changes are made due to safety reasons!

Uma said...

I am so scared of hearing the news from U...But anyhow thank God for keeping my husband in a safe place and i know God will always be with U..

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