Explosions blasted from an electrical fire underneath an elevated subway track near the Myrtle-Broadway station in Brooklyn Thursday morning, sending bangs as loud as gunfire through the neighborhood and showering the street below with hot sparks.
The incident happened just before 8 a.m. on the J, M, and Z lines near the station at Broadway and Stuyvesant Avenue on the border of the Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhoods on June 2.
One local caught the frightening scene on camera on his way to work.
“It made like a loud pop right when I walked underneath of it, with a huge splash of sparks, and I ran down the street away from it and turned around and pulled out my phone,” Sam Dusman told amNewYork Metro. “It was just showering sparks and a huge smokestack.”
Dusman, a technician and jazz musician, said it looked like an electrical box under the tracks was to blame, and he counted his blessings that he wasn’t hit by the fiery debris on his commute.
“I had my earbuds in, I jumped because it was so loud, it was like a gunshot or something,” he said. “The first time it went off, I was practically right underneath of it. I was off to the side of the street, luckily, so nothing hit me.”
The overhead flares stopped other passers-by in their tracks too and approaching drivers turned around to avoid the hail of inferno, which continued for about 45 minutes but without injuring anyone, according to the Fire Department.
Dusman was en route to catching an M train to his job as an audio and visual technician in Manhattan, but the trains stopped running along the line, so he stuck around briefly to take in the spectacle.
“I knew it was going to cause some delays, so I sort of just embraced it, was like, ‘Well, I’ll stand here and see how this turns out before I go the rest of the way back to work,'” he said. “I was a little spooked, a little like I couldn’t take my eyes off of it, because it was kind of like a firework.”
J, M, and Z trains were suspended between Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Twitter account for subway service alerts posted around 8:20 a.m.
J/Z trains are suspended between Broadway Junction and Marcy Av.
M trains are suspended between Middle Village-Metropolitan Av and Marcy Av.FDNY is responding to a track fire between Kosciuszko St and Myrtle Av. https://t.co/HwHkcRef2q
— NYCT Subway (@NYCTSubway) June 2, 2022
The electrical fire included some wiring below the tracks, according to FDNY, and first responders had to cut power in order to extinguish the blaze at 8:49 a.m.
The MTA kept the train lines out of operation near the incident to inspect equipment.
The transit agency restored service to the lines around 10:30 a.m., more than two hours after the incident, while diverting some J and M trains onto the express track to do emergency track work that lasted into Thursday afternoon.
The MTA’s press office did not provide more information about the incident by press time.
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