News By Alison Dadow
A
gas line exploded during construction at John F. Kennedy High School in
the Marble Hill section of Manhattan on Thursday night, injuring three
workers, one critically, and heavily damaging three floors, the
authorities said.
Seven
people were working on a construction project in a science laboratory
on the sixth floor shortly after 8 p.m. when the explosion occurred, the
police said. The workers were draining gas from a main in the lab
before starting their work but failed to drain it completely, setting
off the blast, the police said.
The
force of the explosion blew out windows on the sixth floor and shook a
nearby apartment building, according to officials and witnesses. The
police said that the blast “heavily damaged” the fourth, fifth and sixth
floors of the building, but that no serious fire lingered after the
initial explosion.
“There
is an incredible amount of debris,” a city official said. “It seems
like some exterior walls, the integrity of the walls, are in question.
But there is no fire.” The city official said the injured workers were
“believed to be all contractors.” Officials said that the three injured
workers were all male and that all three were rushed to Jacobi Medical
Center.
The
city official said that all three were believed to have suffered burns
and that “searches are underway and continuing” for anyone else who may
have been injured in the blast. It is believed that the four other
workers were at the location at the time, but it was not immediately
clear if they were injured.
Nearly 140 firefighters responded to the scene.
A spokesman for Consolidated Edison did not immediately return phone calls on Thursday night.
Eric
Kumaga, 73, who lives across the street from the school, said he ran
outside when he felt the force of the blast. Mr. Kumaga said he saw a
large number of firefighters and trucks but no fire or smoke. “The whole
building shook for a very short time, like an earthquake,” he said. “We
all went outside.”
“Right
now there are firefighters still at the school,” he said around 9 p.m.
“We don’t know what happened. We didn’t see smoke.”
The
high school is part of a complex in Marble Hill — a small part of
Manhattan that is physically on the mainland — that contains several
other schools, including Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy, Bronx
School of Law and Finance, and Marble Hill School for International
Studies.