Blood Clot

Shortly before 9 o'clock one morning last week, a 16-ton truck & trailer rig turned off a Jersey City street and rolled ponderously into the tube of the Holland Tunnel, bound for Manhattan. Nobody gave it a second glance--trucks, cars, cabs and buses had been rumbling through the tunnel, day & night, for 22 years (15.6 million passed through in 1948), and the rubber-tired monster looked as harmless and submissive as a sheep in a stockyard runway.

But it carried a fearsome cargo--eighty 55-gallon drums of carbon disulphide, a poisonous and volatile chemical used as a solvent in making rayon and rubber goods. When it had trundled three-fourths of a mile along the echoing, white-tiled, two-mile tube, one of the drums mysteriously exploded. Glaring gouts of flame and clouds of choking yellow fumes burst from the trailer; the driver took one horrified look in his rear-vision mirror, jumped out, ran and leaped on a truck passing in the other lane.

Race to Safety. As the flaming truck rolled, driverless, to a stop, scores of trucks and cars jammed up behind it. Coughing, half-blinded, their drivers and passengers got out and began running for safety; somehow, all got out alive. Within minutes the blocked section of tunnel, 18 ft. below the Hudson River's bed, was a roaring furnace.

Chemical drums exploded like cannon and the fire spread to other trucks; soon tons of meat, eggs, gasoline, cleaning solvent and rags were flaming. River-hemmed Manhattan, which must pump its lifeblood of traffic through overtaxed and distended arteries, reacted like a great organism with a crippling blood clot. As the tunnel's twin tubes were closed, streams of traffic stagnated and honked around its approaches. Electrical cables in the tunnel burned through and the big city's communications began to fail--some radio programs were cut off, Teletypes stopped, 50% of New York's south-and westbound long-distance circuits were knocked out.

Rubble & Risk. A frantic assault by healing antibodies began immediately. To save the tunnel--which had cost $50 million, 14 lives* and seven years' labor--firemen, tunnel workers, policemen and rescue squads fought into the tube at the height of the 4,000-degree fire. Dozens collapsed from smoke and choking gases.

The roadway was piled with rubble, littered with the fused and twisted metal of burned trucks.

Chemical drums went on exploding during the first night and sparks from bulldozer treads fired unburned pools of gasoline and chemicals, but ton after ton of tile, rock and wreckage was dragged out aboveground. The entire tunnel was reopened to traffic only 56 hours after the fire had begun. It would take a million dollars and months of night-time work before the Holland Tunnel was completely restored. But the great tunnel was still tight and safe--fireboats, cruising the Hudson above it, had seen no telltale bubbles of escaping air.

*Among them was Clifford M. Holland, the tunnel project's chief engineer, who died of strain and overwork three years before the great bore was completed.

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