To some this power plant is an eye sore, for some reason I always thought it was beautiful. Well, in my dream this particular power plant was on fire. With flames gushing out from one side while people were running around like crazy. The sound of the fire raging was incredible, I could barely hear the sirens, then there was another explosion, another cloud of smoke and fire blew out of the other side. At this point I woke up.
Like most days it took me a few moments to realize that I was no longer in the dream. The sound continued however, like a pipe organ on fire, kept blowing. The windows were vibrating, and then there was another explosion.
There was no fire fighters or police in sight. My guess is right around the point I was woke up from my dream the first explosion happened. Just like in my dream the fire was growing. Pipes and pieces of the transformer that was on fire were being blown onto the street.
I ran upstairs to my apartment to pack my essentials for evacuating the building. This was stupid in retrospect but there was no way I was going to be stranded in New York City without money, some form of ID and my passport.
On my floor I ran into my neighbor Jim, he had the same idea. He had already packed a suitcase for himself and his wife and was on his way out the building. I rushed into my apartment and salvaged my backpack with my laptop and the papers I needed. I did not even think about clothing. Oh, I also took my portfolio of paintings. These are the times that make me appreciate the fact that I paint small 12x16 watercolor paintings --they pack nicely.
Jim and I ran out of the building with several other people. We kept going. By the time we left the building the fire fighters and police were flocking to the East Side of the 14th street where the fire plant was located. The streets were cordoned off and officers started going through the buildings closest to the plant trying to evacuate anyone and everyone.
Jim and I ran into Jim's wife on the way. She did not even see us, she thought that the fire had already reached our building. Jim had to call her name out several times before she realized he was her husband. After we exchanged our stories we calmed down a bit. It looked like a few avenues down, the power plant fire was under control.
The three of us calmly went to a bar nearby and had lunch. I guess this was a strange reaction to a major gas explosion in a power plant across our apartment building. But what is one to do really when they are faced with these situations. This was also a couple of months after 9/11, so we were always ready for something to explode in those days.
It turned out that one of the transformers in the power plant had experienced and overload and melted down. This meltdown had ignited the gas intake that exploded and became the big gas fire that drove us out of our building.
The power outage that followed hit the West Village and other parts of Lower West Side. Our power was not affected. Strangely, there was little or no coverage of this event. In these post 9/11 months where everyone loved linking everything including a dog pissing on a priceless Thomkins Park statue to terrorism, no one linked this huge explosion and power outage to anything.
Although I had moved away by the time of the second big power outage, I have always thought it strange that the authorities threw out the possibility of sabotage so swiftly and with so little to prove their theory.
A couple of hours later, we were back in our apartments. Our double pane windows were still in place. In fact except for a power outage that did not affect us, one could barely tell this ordeal even took place.
