http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/12/us/manhattan-building-explosion/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 CNN) -- New York police and fire officials were responding to reports of a massive explosion in Manhattan's East Harlem, authorities said Wednesday. There were no immediate reports of injuries, officials said. Images from the area showed smoke billowing from the site of an apparent building collapse near a major commuter rail line. A worker at a nearby flea market said, "Two building have collapsed. I hope there is no in there. It's just rubble."
I'm watching on TV and was waiting for someone to start a thread. I couldn't find a news story on the internet.
If I had to take a guess, I would say natural gas leak or some type of drug lab explosion. Unless someone was trying to make a home made bomb in there.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p><a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%23ConEdison&src=hash">#ConEdison</a> was responding to a report of a gas odor in the area just before the explosion occurred.</p>— Con Edison (@ConEdison) <a href="https://twitter.com/ConEdison/statuses/443767706769428480">March 12, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
It's sad that everything now has to be viewed first for signs of terrorism. Whether we like it or not the tragedy of 911 changed our view of the world! One thing is for certain "We're not in Kansas anymore". I hope there was no loss of life in this explosion.. ....... ....... .......
Gas explosion is probably worse than terrorism. We have an aging gas distribution infrastructure that will probably cause more and more explosions as its integrity fails. And while we can order utilties after the fact to invest to replace aging pipes, most of the time the economics aren't there to incent them to be sufficiently proactive to replace infrastructure before it blows up. And while there might be hundreds of terrorists that want to blow something up, we have thousands and thousands of miles of old pipe.
Except age old gas pipes do not have inspirations of deploying nuclear, chemical and biological weapons against your major cities.
The last time a terrorist attack occurred in NYC was when basso claimed terrorists attacked his apartment building (or a car backfired, forgot which...) In other news, gentrification of Harlem regrets this unfortunate incident!
True, but it's kind of like plane wrecks -- every time a plane wrecks, it kills 100+ people, but it's still not nearly the problem that auto wrecks are, which kill only a couple of people at a time. We make a big deal about terrorist attacks, out of all proportion really to the impact they've had. Besides that, though, I was talking of this event, which was clearly not a big nuclear/chemical/biological attack. If it was any sort of attack, it was a small conventional bomb attack. And we as a country spend a lot of time and effort trying to thwart those. You're right, if a big operation ever gets through, it could be very bad. Apparently, though, those are hard to pull off.
