Visiting our local ground zero

[dreamshark]

I was unusually spooked by yesterday's towering inferno.  Mostly, I guess, it's having a sudden potentially lethal emergency erupt in my own backyard (2 miles from my house) in the midst of the ongoing disaster in Japan. But I've always had a particularly strong horror/fascination response to things that should be stable suddenly erupting into a giant fireball, be it spontaneous human combustion or a gas line explosion. One of the scariest moments in my life was being jolted out of a sound sleep one night by a low-flying plane. My first thought was "Oh My God, the house has blown up and we're all going to die!" (The fact that it became obvious within seconds that this was not the case didn't make that split-second any less scary.)

Anyway, we were short on groceries last night and briefly debated going to Rainbow instead of Cub just in case the street was still closed, but... nah.  We wanted to see the big hole in the pavement. So to Cub we went. Yes, it was open. Seemed perfectly normal except that the sign on the front had been removed for repair (having been melted). 

There was some confusion in the news reports yesterday about exactly where the plume of fire was located. Now we know. It was on 60th Street (well, welling up out of a hole in the middle of 60th Street), right next to the Cub parking lot. It was towards the east side of the lot, quite close to the freeway entrance there. Fortunately it would be hard to pick a less flammable location - nothing there but asphalt and concrete.

At 10 pm there was a Centerpoint Energy Truck, a couple of Eyewitness News trucks and two work crews with heavy equipment busily engaged in digging up 60th Street. They seemed to be digging up the entire block, from Nicollet all the way to the freeway. I guess they are removing the entire section of pipe so it can be inspected by a team of forensic explosion investigators. I'm not sure what the news teams were doing there - maybe lighting matches in the hopes of setting off another explosion so they would have something to take pictures of?  Just watching people digging up a street for hours on end has to be one of the more boring Eyewitness News assignments.

Comments

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

Wow, what footage! It's pretty amazing that there were no injuries either. A much better outcome than the San Bruno explosion here last fall, which is resulting in a big investigation of PG&E, exposure of poor record-keeping, faulty maps, etc.