Friday, September 10, 2010

At least 4 dead in Gas Explosion and Fires in San Bruno, CA









Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado says four people have died in the gas line explosion in San Bruno, Calif. At mid-morning, he said the blaze had cover 15 acres and was 75% contained. Maldonado said 52 people have been hospitalized in the blaze, three in critical condition. Earlier, San Bruno Fire Captain Charlie Barringer put the death toll at 6, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Update at 10:10 a.m. ET: County coroner confirms 4 dead, the AP reports.

Update at 8:23 a.m. ET: The San Francisco Chronicle says at least 20 people have been injured and reports that the fire destroyed 53 homes and damaged 120 more. The newspaper says the fire raged "unabated" for almost an hour as emergency crews rushed in an residents streamed out.

....

Fire crews tried to douse the remnants of an enormous blaze and account for the residents of dozens of homes Friday after a gas line ruptured and an explosion ripped through in a neighborhood near San Francisco, killing at least four people.

Crews with dogs went house to house in the neighborhood near San Francisco and officials said there could be more casualties from the Thursday evening blast. Homes were left with just chimneys standing and smoke still rose from blocks of smoldering wreckage. San Bruno Fire Chief Dennis Haag said Friday afternoon a quarter of the homes are still too hot to search.

Police are blocking people from approaching the burn area, telling them it's being treated as a crime scene.

"It was pretty devastating," Haag said. "It looks like a moonscape in some areas."

At least 50 people were hurt, with eight in critical condition at area hospitals. The explosion that left a giant crater and sent flames tearing through the middle-class neighborhood of 1960s-era homes in hills overlooking San Francisco, the bay and the airport. - yahoo

As homes still smoldered in a San Bruno neighborhood after a gas line ruptured and sparked a massive inferno Thursday, residents in the area said they had complained about a gas smell for weeks.

via PG&E Investigating Complaints of Gas Smell in San Bruno | NBC Bay Area.

Tragic. I had a dream as a kid of little fires leaping up all over the place out of the ground in an ordinary neighborhood like this.  I hope this was only a PG&E line that ruptured. That would be something we can fix. If huge bubbles of methane start to surface all over the place, however  ...

7 comments:

dogsounds said...

What's the noise on the film?

Xeno said...

That's just audio interference from the mother ship's death ray.

dogsounds said...

Man, you'd figure they would have backwards-engineered supressors by now...

Cheng said...

On the Mother ship?

Ann said...

"I had a dream as a kid of little fires leaping up all over the place out of the ground in an ordinary neighborhood like this."

Did you have the dream before the actual event? Such precognitive dreams do occur sometimes among some people.

Xeno said...

Yes the dream was over 20 years before the San Bruno event. Perhaps there are tunnels in time and an as yet undiscovered mechanism that allows us to glimpse the future when certain time waves line up. Or there are just coincidences and interpretation after the fact where we delude ourselves by adding meaning where there is none.

Ann said...

Ok, but "over 20 years" ago may not qualify for a precognitive event. Unless, your dream was quite specific and detailed and you can pinpoint San Bruno in the dream. Precognitive dreams usually occur a day or so, or maybe a few weeks at the most, before the event. Memories from the dream world get hazy after longer periods of times. But, there are exceptions.