Truck-eating bridge cam records nearby explosion

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/11/truck-eating-bridge-cam-record.html

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I don’t know… I’ve seen Attack of the Giant Savage Completely Invisible Aliens

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Linked in the post, but not made into the video, that camera did record the sound. Yowsa!

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Neither of my computers show any video at all, just a rectangle with a scroll bar. The scroll bar is functional. Is this some new video format?

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If you have your pihole or other adblocker on, it blocks the video I think because of the ad that plays at the beginning of it.

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I was going to post something else, but shit, the owner of the coffee house died in the explosion. Nothing humorous about that. It’s just tragic.

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My ad blocker is on and the video autoplays

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That’s here in my town. My wife and I felt and heard the explosion from about two miles away, but didn’t think anything of it until our friend called from downtown to say that there was a monster gas explosion next to our son’s school. So then we spent an anxious few minutes trying to figure out what was going on. About 30 minutes after the explosion the school announced that all students and staff were safe and unhurt, and that they were evacuating the school.

We are very fortunate that the school campus is long and stretches away from the blast site, and that there is a wide lawn between the blast site and the first building on campus. It sounds like the building across the street from the site is in danger of collapsing as a result of the explosion.

Mr. Lee, the coffee shop owner, was killed in the blast. A lot of people in town knew him. The kids at my son’s school are planning to wear white in his memory on Thursday. There were 8 or 9 customers in the shop when the leak began, but Mr. Lee and the fire department were able to get them to safety before the explosion happened. 25 other people were injured in the blast, including 9 firefighters. I think some of them are still in serious or critical condition over at Duke, but it sounds like all are expected to recover.

It sounds like the explosion happened while students at the school were changing classes. My son’s buddy said that he was outside in front of the school and looked back in time to see bricks and debris flying into the street. Then of course the kids panicked and ran for it, as they should. The school/school district and first responders did a great job, first moving the kids to the north end of the campus (away from potentially damaged buildings), and then evacuating them.

We went downtown today for something else, and streets are closed for a pretty big radius around the explosion site. A lot of folks are still displaced as a result of the explosion. There are condos and apartments all around the area.

One thing I learned as a result of this is that there was a collection of classic Porsches housed in a warehouse next to the coffeeshop. I walked past that building a hundred times and never had a clue. Probably most of those cars are destroyed. It looks like all the buildings in that block will need to be demolished. They’re all part of a Studebaker dealership that was built in the 1920s.

The last thing I heard, they thought a contractor installing fiber optic lines caused the gas leak by accidentally drilling into a 2 in. gas line. What’s weird about it is that so far no one knows who or where that contractor is. To me it sounds like he hit the gas line and just booked it. People were alerted to the leak by the smell, called the fire dept., and the fire dept. and gas company employees started the evacuation.

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I was in Israel a few years ago (not long after the Iron Dome had gone live) at a vendor’s offices, about a kilometer from the West Bank. We were in an internal meeting room when the building shook and the lights went out. We made our way to the sidewalk, and as we watched a plume of black smoke rise from the next block over, another explosion shook us. There were no missiles, no air raid sirens, and not even a real panic - just the explosions and smoke. We didn’t know what else to do, so we followed our host’s lead; we continued to stand on the sidewalk and watch the smoke. Eventually, people got bored and wandered back to their offices.

After a while, when we learned that an automotive repair shop had a fire and explosion in their paint storage room, everyone became happy! My coworker and I were perplexed by this reaction. Someone explained to us that they were thrilled to finally have a normal industrial accident that wasn’t caused by rockets fired from the West Bank.

Travel definitely gives you a new sense of perspective.

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Crazy day to be working at Prescient, it appears.

Not to be too glib in this situation, but I wonder if it was the same shady-ass contractors that decided it was a good idea to do fiber trenching by unloading a mini-excavator over my 120-year-old knee wall onto my lawn at 11pm one night a few months ago. Yes, they managed to significantly damage the wall, and my lawn, and wake the baby.

When I called the city they said they’d had no end of problems with this contractor and had already had a couple stop-work orders called on them.

OpenDurham has a bunch of background on 115 N. Duke St., AKA the Studebaker Building.

Edit: Dang, OpenDurham has already updated the page to include information on the explosion.

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