| dada Sani |
Vcera denot mi zapocna so ovaa vest. Zenata navistina imala srekja sto se "zakacila" na cevka, a uste pogolema srekja sto cevkata ne se oshtetila i ne doslo do eksplozija. Najgolema srekja kje bide koga kje go tuzi gradot i kje zeme teshka para:)
It Really Was Big Enough to Drive a Truck Into
About 3:30 a.m. yesterday, Nancy Batista was stopped at a traffic light in her Ford Explorer on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, headed south, as in toward the South Pole.
A few seconds later, she was heading south as in toward the center of the earth.
A burst water main had scoured away the earth beneath the surface of the street, and Ms. Batista's two-ton Ford Explorer broke through the asphalt and fell in. The hole was 10 feet deep. But Ms. Batista was lucky: her S.U.V. landed on a gas main about four feet down. Ms. Batista, 46, escaped with only bruises and cuts, doctors said.
The whole neighborhood around Fourth Avenue and 73rd Street, in Bay Ridge, was lucky. The gas main did not burst into flames. Gushing water did not flood the neighborhood. No one lost power, or gas, or water service.
Even the Explorer looked pretty good, considering that it had just plunged into a big hole. Over the course of the morning, it fell farther in, until only its rear end stuck up above ground level. When hoisted out with a crane just before noon, it seemed mostly intact, though its front end was banged up and the hood crumpled. There was no word on whether it could be salvaged.
People who rely on the R train were not as lucky. At some point after the S.U.V. tipped into the hole, two feet of mud and debris rained onto the subway tracks, which run under Fourth Avenue. The R line was closed in both directions from 59th Street to its southern terminus at 95th Street and remained closed through the evening rush.
Fourth Avenue, a heavily traveled roadway and a popular alternative to the ever-jammed Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, was also closed, for four blocks in both directions, until further notice.
Officials at the city's Department of Environmental Protection said they did not know yet what had caused the 90-year-old water main to break, or exactly when it broke. But by the time Ms. Batista tumbled, the water was flowing swiftly, said her sister, Maggie Nieves.
Ms. Nieves, talking to reporters at Lutheran Medical Center, where Ms. Batista was in stable condition, said that Ms. Batista had been about to turn right onto 73rd Street. "She was making a turn and the street swallowed her up," Ms. Nieves said. "All she saw was the water and the pipes. It looked like Niagara Falls."
Two good Samaritans, one of them a sergeant in the military, helped Ms. Batista out of the S.U.V. and onto the street, Ms. Nieves said.
The superintendent of a building at Fourth Avenue and 73rd Street, Mujo Noksici, said Ms. Batista appeared dazed. "She wasn't that bad," he said. "She looked more scared than hurt."
The director of the trauma unit at Lutheran, Dr. David Ford, said that Ms. Batista had "a lot of generalized pain in her neck and abdomen and elsewhere," as well as "generalized bruises and scrapes." A hospital spokesman said she would be kept overnight for observation.
Ms. Batista lives in Kissimmee, Fla., and had come to New York to visit her sister and a friend, Ms. Nieves said. By the time the Explorer was hauled out, the hole in the street measured 15 feet across and 20 feet deep. A director of the city's Office of Emergency Management, Daniel O'Keefe, said that the size of the hole was not that unusual, even if what filled it was.
"Water mains break often in this city," Mr. O'Keefe said. "But cars don't often end up in them."
A block south of the hole, classes were canceled at Our Lady of Angels School, but the 11:45 a.m. Mass at the church went on as scheduled, with the 30th Psalm.
"Oh Lord, you brought me up from the netherworld," it reads. "You preserved me from among those going down into the pit. I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me"
[img]http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/03/28/nyregion/28sink2.184.jpg[/img]
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