A retaining wall in the Upper West side of New York at the Hudson River, just up-river from the George Washington Bridge has collapsed and buried several parked cars at the very least. I was unable to find out if anyone had been caught in the collapse: no one seemed to know at the time I was asking around.
Since I am on the same side as the collapse, I was unable to get into a position to get a picture. There is nowhere one could do so without standing on part of the hillside which has just collapsed and the NYPD has the cliffside cordoned off in both directions for many blocks. I know. I tried.
I do know that the Henry Hudson Parkway is closed and traffic in NYC is a royal mess right now.
I ha ve never in my life heard so many sirens and seen so many emergency vehicles. Lines of them filling city block after city block and off into side streets. Broadcast vans from every station in New York with a news program. Talking hairdo’s smiling into TV cameras every which way you look. Police smiling and saying absolutely nothing about what is going on. Lots of the folk thought it must be a terrorist threat because there was nothing but rumour floating through the gathered crowds.
You will get the details on the News at Eleven… but I will start uploading some of my on the scene photos. So, here goes… Dale Amon reporting Live and On The Scene in New York City…. Roll ’em!
Move along now, nothing to see here…
The line of emergency vehicles fades off into the distance.
Notice the herd of cameramen down on the edge of the hillside where they can all go down together. Somewhere along there and below is my best current guess as to where the collapse occurred.
Gee, Perry, when can we get one too?
The talking heads were out in force.
A newsgirl and her cameraman.
This is a couple blocks upriver. Beautiful view but still cordoned off. Note the hardhats and police near the hillside.
This shot is from about three or four blocks upriver. Obviously you cannot see the collapse, but it does give you an idea where it happened. That is the George Washington Bridge.
Coffee break time I presume…
Update: No one was hurt; cleanup will probably take through the weekend; traffic on the Henry Hudsen Parkway is being diverted at 181st St.
Morning Update: I was able to get to a location from which I could get a photo of the actual collapse area and it was not where I’d thought it, but a block further upriver. The big worry yesterday was whether or not some apartment buildings had been undermined. Engineers determined they were safe so this morning it was easy for me to get within telephoto range.
Well, the war for blogs is over. I just went to ABC, CBS and CNN to find something about this, and got nothing. I didn’t look far, but cntrl-F’d “york” for “new york” and “hudson”, but got nothing.
In other words, it wasn’t easily available through instant sight and placement searches even if it was there and on time, which it looks like no one is.
So now you’re scooping CBS.
To be absolutely fair, it is all over the local NY news. I would say I ran neck and neck with them on this story, and perhaps a little bit behind the folks with the really nice truck because I had to walk back to where I was staying and do the image processing thing before I could get the photoblogging part of it filed.
But it was kind of fun wandering around amongst them with the secret thought in mind that I would be filing to an audience nearly as large as some of them have.
I think we may actually be big enough now to get news credentials. Perhaps it would be worth our while to do so.
Good on yer!
That’s nothing – this happens in Dubai all the time.
To be absolutely unfair, New York is a smallish, rather unimportantish part of the country given a bit of weight because of a heavy density of people, and most of us live elsewhere. To be even more unfair, we’re important, so our needs come before theirs.
I take the total-selfish postmodern technology point on this for the American Imperium (offer not valid in Rest of World, trademark 1945, renewed 1989): if I don’t have everything fed to me the instant it happens like Samizdata does, it doesn’t happen. So if the media fail once, they’ve failed period.
The average savvy viewer resembles Ceasar in that regard- total limp expectation of complete, instant service. I was pissed and petulant I didn’t get the story. And provincialism: don’t you know we here in Texas are the center of the world and deserve to know before…er, well, the people it happened to? If it didn’t happen to me sitting here, it didn’t happen.
I suspect this will get much worse, or better. What an interesting beast, the connection of humanity. Blogs will be obsolete before I change jobs again, but they will long have supplanted that which they’re attacking now.
I take the total-selfish postmodern technology point on this for the American Imperium
Hmmm…. actually I think the most important part of the story was interesting photos. Nothing Earth shattering, just an interesting bit of day to day reporting from where I happened to be at the moment.
If you want the philisophical point, I am not sure there is one. If you want a thought on the metacontext of my post, then perhaps it is that with enough bloggers and cameras out there, virtually anything of interest to anyone will be covered and available to you if you want it. If something does not interest you, then… move along now, nothng to see here….
To me, the best part of the story was that no one was hurt.
Actually I can think of a couple things worth a philosophical thought or two. First off, why did a retaining wall collapse, however large, require a blocks long queue of emergency vehicles of every description? Second, given terrorist fears and people wondering what was going on, why do the police on site not give passerby at least a minimal bit of information rather than let rumours float about?
And related to the first point, how much did all this cost and did NYC tax payers get value for money tying up that much kit? I think a tape at one point a couple patrol cars there and some geologists and emergency vehicles down below to do the digging, and perhaps one chopper for overview and a couple ambulances just in case.
The level of response was like like a mini-9/11. Way over the top.
Could you please fix the size of the photos? Opera lists them all as being 2MB and up, and trying to open the Samizdata main page is slowing everything else down to an interminable crawl.
The first thing that came to my mind is is this the first of many such issues? Suffice it to say, harldy enough funds are put into infrastructure. It is one of the first of the bait and switches. “Everyone is for projects like project X, so cough it up!” Then when the money flowed nice and easy, they found other uses for it.
The Interstate I drive to and from work is in horrible shape, the streets in my small town need a lot of work, and the streets in the mid-sized city I work in aren’t anything to write home about (there was some work a few years on the Interstate, but what they accomplished I don’t know).
An old neighbor of mine is a bridge inspector and, in his opinion, we in the US were in for surprise when dough was needed to put into keep in the bridges up in the air.
So, of course, I can turn this into another screed against the government. But it is alarming that there just isn’t enough money for infrastructure, one of the most agreed upon functions of government (but not universal), because it is all sopped up for other good works. The lesson is that the government turns on the faucet but never turns it off. It will trot out the list of Good Reasons, and then divert the resources later from the bloated tax role. Meanwhile the roads, bridges, and retaining walls go to hell. “People, we’ve got a problem, see we need more money, you want good roads don’t you?” And the process continues. All the while the Feds and (most) States are in fiscal crises with whatever they’re spending money on as is.
I think we’re going to here more about such things in the next decade. And the answer? More taxes.
Heh heh.
This morning on local news in Greater NYC:
4 story embankment collapse on the Parkway 4+ lanes blocked -Totallys fouls Manhattan Traffic
Train Bridge catches Fire in New Jersey: – Fouls up NJ rail link (which means all the other NJ routes foul up too.)
Amtrak fouled up in Boston – NY corridor –
2-3 major vehicle accidents, one on another Bridge.
All the usual and normal morning traffic chaos occurs too.
The flippin’ traffic report took over the entire newscast, e.g. weather report : “Today nice, cool, sunny, like yesterday, now back to traffic”
Oh my Lord the Washington Bridge is a thing of beauty. When it was built it was something like double the length of any other span in the world. Truly a glorious achievement of engineering.
Over the top emergency services response? Maybe they are using it to practice their deployment and test their comms etc for the next ‘real’ disaster?