Fire Forces Evacuations of Downtown Philadelphia

[charlie and algernon]

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) -- An underground transformer caught fire Thursday, forcing evacuations at two downtown office buildings, authorities said.

Several hundred office workers were milling around the area near City Hall after the two nearby buildings were evacuated.

The area is near a subway and commuter rail station, but the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority said those services were running normally.

Authorities also closed streets in a 25-square-block area.

There were no reports of injuries, police Capt. Thomas Helker said.

Messages left for the fire department and the local electric utility were not immediately returned.


edit to add: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/21/philadelphia.fire.ap/index.html

[Divernan]

1. A prime example of crumbling infrastructure while private operators profit

If Phillie's electric company is like Duquesne Light here in Pittsburgh, it is overloading its systems with more customers/demand than they can handle, PLUS not keeping up with maintenance and repair. Duquesne Light tries to get by with blaming every blown transformer on "lightning strikes", i.e, acts of god for which they are not liable. Acting for a constituent, who was plagued and nearly driven out of his small manufacturing business by weekly power surges/failure from blown transformers, I dragged them in front of the state utility board and proved through official weather reports that there was NO lightning on the dates in question and forced them to produce diagrams of their systems showing how many customers they were crowding onto old and overburdened equipment/systems. Plus, they were way behind on their schedule for branch/tree clearing of their easements for high power lines.

[Benhurst]

2. Typical of what happens in third-rate, soon to be Third World countries.

:boring:

Better get used to it.

[drm604]

3. I'm on the 1900 block of Market Street,

just outside the cordoned area. We've been hearing sirens all afternoon and traffic is all backed up. They're claiming that Septa's trains are running normally (their buses have been rerouted) so hopefully I'll have a way home tonight! I thought for sure the trains would be affected because some of the explosions were near Suburban Station and City Hall.

[nashville_brook]

4. 25 square blocks!