While riding the Water Taxi back from Red Hook today (visiting the vanishing ballfield food vendors) we saw a dark cloud of smoke over Lower Manhattan. It had that 9/11 look and smell -- and feeling.
It turned out not to be a terrorist attack, as we feared, but the Deutsche Bank Building burning. We stood and watched the blaze, a 7-alarm fire. Every few minutes we could hear debris collapsing inside and see flaming chunks dropping to the streets. Firefighters rode up the side of the building in external construction elevators. Two firefighters have now been reported dead.
At the margin of Battery Park City, families sat in the grass with dogs and kids, watching the fire. It looked like a 4th of July picnic. We stood with crowds on Greenwich and Rector. I spoke to a Newsday reporter who said the rumor is that the fire might be "suspicious." Maybe someone doesn't want to go through the very expensive and painstaking process of dismantling this building piece by piece.
The West Side Highway was a river of red rescue vehicles. Collapse units were on site because the building was severely damaged on 9/11 and is unstable. Hundreds of human remains have been found there since 2001. Huffington Post has more news about the possible toxins we were breathing. The whole scene did bring back that familiar, eerie feeling.
All photos from my flickr stream
1 comments:
That's quite a good yunnie crowd scene you got there in the fifth picture. Was that intentional? I can almost hear them going "like, oh my god, dude!" to each other.
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