Two explosions rocked Myrtle Avenue this morning, punctuating an underground fire that raged for hours and cloaked two busy Fort Greene blocks in noxious smoke.
According to witnesses, the first blast tore out of a manhole cover outside of the restaurant Maggie Brown between Washington Avenue and Waverly Place, shooting multi-colored flames to the tops of the wheels of parked cars. Momar Clemons was doing design work in his apartment overlooking the street while, downstairs, his girlfriend lunched with friends at Maggie Brown when the explosion occurred, sending her into a frenzy.
“She ran up and I was gathering all my stuff,” Clemons said. “But she told me, ‘You’re tripping. We have to get out of here!’”
The explosion, which Con Edison says was caused by smoldering cables, sparked an apparent chain reaction, starting a fire in the basement of 459 Myrtle Ave. and spewing black smoke out of a second, nearby manhole in the middle of Washington Avenue. Onlookers fled when a second explosion shot out of that manhole cover, launching a fireball that rose three-stories high.
Con Edison cut power to the intersection in an effort to contain the fire, police blocked off the street for two blocks, and the fire department evacuated several buildings.
Firefighters ran into a problem, though, when they knocked on the door of the Clinton Hill Animal Clinic and found a dog surgery in progress.
The veterinary surgical team was performing a dental cleaning on a Pomeranian named Bam-Bam when the first blast shook the block. They completed the surgery with firefighters anxiously knocking on their door. Unable to move their petite patient until he woke up from anesthesia, the doggy doctors waited another 30 minutes before finally evacuating Bam-Bam to an air conditioned Park Slope clinic.
“We need to get her to a cooler place,” veterinary technician Tom Dillon said, cradling a shaking Bam-Bam in a towel on the sidewalk.
The two-alarm fire burned for three hours and took over 100 firefighters to extinguish.
Four buildings remain without power and the building that houses Maggie Brown, 455 Myrtle Ave., sustained structural damage in the fire, according to Con Edison spokesman Chris Olert. Olert said that Con Edison does not know when electricity will be restored.
