1973 Staten Island gas explosion
1973 gas explosion in New York City
On February 10, 1973, a gas explosion occurred inside a Texas Eastern Transmission Pipeline tank storing liquefied natural gas in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Staten Island, New York City, while 42 workers were cleaning the tank. The tank had supposedly been completely drained ten months earlier, but ignition occurred, causing a plume of combusting gas to rise. Two workers near the top felt the heat and rushed to the safety of scaffolding outside, while the other 40 workers died as the concrete cap on the tank rose 20 to 30 feet (6.1 to 9.1 m) in the air and then came crashing back down, crushing them.
The incident was the worst industrial accident in Staten Island's history. It resulted in a moratorium on liquefied natural gas storage facilities in New York state.
Background
At the time of the incident, Rossville, Bloomfield, and other Staten Island neighborhoods had numerous liquefied natural gas storage tanks. In 1970, Distrigas had announced plans to build nine 37,800,000-US-gallon (143,000,000 L; 31,500,000 imp gal) gas tanks in Rossville, of which two were built. Opposition to such tanks developed slowly, but by 1971, many Staten Island residents were opposed to the construction of gas tanks. Gene and Edwina Cosgriff formed the group Bring Legal Action to Stop the Tanks (BLAST) to protest the tanks' construction after hearing about the theoretical negative effects of an oil spill within the nearby Arthur Kill waterway. Patrick A. Mercurio, BLAST's chairman, later said that according to scientists, "an explosion of a tank filled with gas would extend to an area eight miles by one mile—the equivalent of a small nuclear explosion".
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This entry incorporates text from “1973 Staten Island gas explosion” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.