Word: steams
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...bane of the environmentalist movement is neither a steam-belching factory nor a gas-guzzling pickup truck, but an item whose overwhelming prevalence in the world makes its elimination a daunting task: the dreaded plastic...
...midtown Manhattan on Wednesday stirred the anxieties of New Yorkers who have experienced plenty of them since 9/11. But given the decrepit state of the country's urban infrastructure, the debacle could very well have been at a bridge in Boston or a sewer in Philadelphia. Indeed, the Manhattan steam-pipe geyser might be compared to the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 blackout of the Eastern Seaboard: accidents and catastrophes that might have been prevented with the right funding and political priorities...
Rarely does infrastructure fail as spectacularly as it did Wednesday, when plumes of smoke billowed as high as the 77-story Chrysler Building. Deterioration takes place slowly, and often, when something breaks down, the impact is minimal - for example, wisps of steam coming out of a city manhole due to a leaky pipe. Bill Miller, who worked for over 30 years as an administrative engineer with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, says the city tended to act only after the fact. "They respond to these systems when problems appear...
About half an hour after the explosion, from behind yellow caution tape, dozens of rubberneckers snapped camera phone shots of the steam that was billowing as high as the nearby Chrysler Building. A small school bus sat a few feet away from the site, abandoned. TV helicopters showed what appeared to be pickup truck in the crater created by the explosion. Nearby, an elderly woman covered in dark brown debris and clearly alarmed approached two police officers, who offered to call an ambulance or drive her home. A few blocks away, some of the crowd formed a knot around...
...incident was nothing more than "a failure of our infrastructure," the mayor said at a press conference about two and half hours after the explosion. "No terrorism... No criminality." According to Con Ed, the incident was caused by an operational problem in the area. Millions of pounds of steam course through pipes below New York City streets every hour, heating and cooling thousands of buildings. They can be prone to breakage: in 1989, a massive steam explosion that sent mud and refuse several stories high killed three people. Bloomberg said that a 24-inch steam pipe, installed...