Automobile Hearth Causes Closure, Repairs of NYC’s Holland Tunnel

My best irrational concern as a life-long New Yorker is getting caught in one of many metropolis’s vehicular tunnels throughout a hearth. This is likely to be the plot of Daylight, a 1996 catastrophe movie starring Sylvester Stallone, however tunnel fires do happen in the true world. Three years after the movie’s launch, 39 individuals had been killed when a truck caught hearth in the tunnel beneath Mont Blanc between Italy and France. Whereas Daylight’s tunnel scenes had been filmed on a studio set in Rome, the movie is primarily set in the Holland Tunnel. Sadly, this tunnel isn’t any stranger to notable incidents.

A sedan caught hearth within the Manhattan-bound facet of the Holland Tunnel round 9 p.m. Sunday night time, in accordance with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Video streamed to Citizen, a smartphone app, reveals the automobile already engulfed in flames contained in the 1.6-mile tunnel. The tunnel connects New York Metropolis with New Jersey beneath the Hudson River. Port Authority Police had stopped drivers from trying to go across the blaze straight into a wall of smoke. The video concludes with an emergency automobile arriving on the scene from the tunnel’s Manhattan finish. It’s unclear why the sedan caught hearth.

The Holland Tunnel was the primary mechanically ventilated tunnel on the earth. Earlier than its official opening in November 1927, the air flow system was examined by a automobile purposely set alight contained in the tunnel. The system efficiently dissipated the hearth inside three and a half minutes.

Since then, the tunnel’s air flow system has been constantly up to date and was final modernized within the 2000s. You’ll be able to see the air flow system in motion within the automobile hearth video as smoke is contained primarily to the world across the automobile.

The tunnel was solely closed for about an hour earlier than authorities reopened it to visitors, however closed an hour later to finish important in a single day repairs. These repairs are as well as to the tunnel’s scheduled storm resiliency enhancements and repairs after Hurricane Sandy flooded the tunnel in 2012.