New York Yankee fans and Boston Red Sox devotees, historic adversaries, have at least one thing in common — the aging infrastructure beneath their urban centers. And while Beantown and Big Apple citizens can live for a while with leaky water mains and so-so sewer lines, when underground steam pipes rupture the results can be deadly.
Last month a manhole explosion occurred at the corners of Otis and Summer streets in downtown Boston, injuring four, spraying them with steaming water that may have contained asbestos. The accident victims were decontaminated by EMS workers before being transported to local hospitals with non-life threatening injuries.
A similar incident took place in July in New York, when a steam pipe exploded underneath Lexington Avenue during the evening rush hour, leading to one death and injuring 20 others. The blast from the 83-year-old pipe left a crater in the middle of the road and sent clouds of steam, mud, and debris into the air. A similar accident occurred in 1989 when a steam pipe explosion killed three people in Gramercy Park.
What’s going on down there? Unknown to most of the inhabitants of New York City, Boston, and many of the older cities on the East Coast, pressurized steam (a byproduct of a local power plant’s electricity generation) courses through aging asbestos pipelines beneath downtown areas.
Con Edison is in charge of New York’s power infrastructure. On a daily basis millions of pounds of steam (used to power the heating and cooling systems of 100,000 buildings in Manhattan) surges through pipes that were installed in the 1920s. Boston’s steam pipes cover a smaller footprint, a 22-mile network of steam pipes that heat and cool 240 office, hospital, and hotel buildings, including City Hall, the New England Aquarium, and New England Medical Center. Trigen-Boston Energy’s plant pumps 1.7 million pounds of steam per hour through insulated pipes to end users, where it is then circulated through building radiators or powers the turbines of air conditioning systems.
Two months before the most recent Boston explosion, the city’s mayor called for greater regulation of Boston’s underground steam pipes. However, urban power and water infrastructure repair is very expensive, and cuts deeply into the profitability of the companies operating them. It may take more steam explosions, more public awareness, outrage, and lawsuits to prompt governments and power companies to invest the kind of time and money required to really make steam systems safe.
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