Tuesday, October 30, 2012

flood, fire: low tide

With the waters receding, all the cars and heavy equipment densely parked behind the warehouse in the last photo were uncovered. My guess is that an electrical spark, coupled perhaps with some liberated gasoline from a submerged fuel tank vent, led to a small fire. Which led to a big fire. And some explosions. We are upwind and have a decent-sized concrete dock between us and the cars, so we stayed put while our tug called 911. The fire department took forever to find the place. I saw them 10 minutes before they got in the neighborhood, and then another 15 minutes to dig up a masonry saw to cut through the fences in their way. Eventually they got to the fire and about 30 minutes later they put it out. My camera was overwhelmed between the lights, backscatter from the fire monitors on the tugs being turned on (monitors are the super-sized water cannon that you see on fire boats; many tugs have one just in case for situations like this ).
EDIT: This were, apparently, very expensive electric cars. Like, $100,000+ each expensive. And mightily flammable, as well. The Fisker Karma advertising campaign doesn't mention that.
in case being completely underwater for a few hours didn't kill one of these cars, God decided to set 'em all on fire.

car exploding. Quite a unique sound.

Newark FD response was slow but damn, everybody showed up. 







 Next high tide is in a few hours. Not supposed to be as high as the last one, but still might be rotten.

4 comments:

Bartender Cabbie said...

Now that is what I call live blogging

Anonymous said...

Glad to see that you've survived. Here's a report of the aftermath of one ship's experience with the surge:

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/tanker-run-aground-superstorm-120726358--abc-news-topstories.html

NotClauswitz said...

I'm sorry to hear about your truck!

Anonymous said...

Old diesel electric submariners can tell you all about the bad juju of batteries and salt water. Thats all it was i would hazard.
Jay