NYC gets a little steamy

Some amazing news this evening. At 5:56pm, there was a huge steam explosion in Midtown Manhattan. For those of you who've come to visit, you'll know that I happen to work in Midtown on 42nd Street. In fact, it was about two blocks from the office. Thankfully, I was working in New Jersey today, so missed the drama. I've since spoken to people from the office who have incredible accounts of the amount of steam, rubble, noise and commotion in the area. It took Con Ed (the power company) about two hours to shut off the steam.


There was a massive plume of steam shooting into the sky. Apparently, people over 20 floors up had rubble hitting their windows. Public transport was completely thrown into chaos and traffic came to a virtual standstill.

So why steam? Apparently, there are a number of steam generation plants in Manhattan (and the outer Boroughs) which are used by businesses for heating, air conditioning (?) and cleaning. It is piped through the city under extremely high pressure. The pipe that burst was built in the 1920s. In a city as old as New York, things are bound to fail. Even the subway is over 100 years old. This place was bigger a century ago than Brisbane will be 100 years from now. Unfortunately, one person died and that number may increase through the night.

A very unusual day, and thankfully we've not been involved. Also, it looks as though commuting to Midtown tomorrow will be chaos. Luckily, I'm in New Jersey again tomorrow, so won't have to deal with it. The second photo is immediately out the front of our office.

New York is certainly a place with a lot going on. Since we moved here, we've had a plane crash into a building on the Upper East Side, the steam explosion today and the (very embryonic) plot to blow up the fuel store at JFK and its supply pipeline. Life here moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you miss it.

(Thanks to the New York Times for the photos I ripped off)

Update (also courtesy of NYT): The pipe that burst is part of an underground network that Consolidated Edison acquired in the mid-1950s, when it absorbed the old New York Steam Corporation, which started selling steam to Manhattan buildings in 1882. The steam company’s huge generating plants once powered elevators. But as electricity became more widely available the demand for steam power leveled off.

Now the steam is used to spin turbines that make electricity in Con Edison plants. After that, it is piped to about 1,800 customers in Manhattan, mainly large buildings. In most cases, the steam provides heating and, with the help of compressors, air-conditioning.