In honor of the events of yesterday I decided to finish up my ‘New York on Film’ post that I started a week or two ago. These are the second set of shots that were part of my first photo assignment for TSC, to capture New York on film while it was still new to me. Shot these back before even the first of our snowstorms (which seems like a million years ago now that it’s so hot here!).

As for the events of yesterday…I was sitting in my office on the 4th floor (corner of 52nd and Broadway) when I heard/felt a huge explosion. At first I thought a truck/car had hit the side of our building, so I jumped up and looked out our window to see tons of smoke and a huge, green fire coming up out of a grate in the middle of the road.

Within minutes there were tons of firefighters there and they began battling the flames, which kept getting worse. After about 20/30 minutes of this the church came on the loud speakers and told us to evacuate the building. As we left, the stairwells were filled with the smell of smoke and firefighters entered our building shortly thereafter to tell us that there were dangerous levels of CO2 and that we couldn’t come back inside until Thursday.

In the end there was a second explosion that blew off a manhole and chunks of the street and 7 firefighters were treated for minor injuries (from the local news site). It was an electrical fire that caused several underground transformers to explode. There were over 130 firefighters there and they closed down 4 blocks of Broadway (a huge deal in NYC).

We’re all interested to get back to the office and see if there’s any fire/smoke damage…apparently the road is pretty messed up on 52nd between 8th and Broadway. What a crazy day…

Here’s a video of the first explosion that we felt: VIDEO.

On the bright side we get the day off today and all of the interns had to spend the night with us since they couldn’t go back into their homes there, so I think we’re all going to go play at the park! Hope you all have a beautiful Wednesday…until Thursday, signing off.