Steam pipe, schmeam pipe

A few have asked 'where were you?', 'did you hear it?', 'did you see it?' when the steam pipe explosed several weeks ago, causing traffic chaos, injuring quite a few people and causing someone to have a heart attack and die, I imagine, from fright.

I didn't know about it until later that night when I was at my Scrabble thing and someone mentioned it, and I looked up the news on my iPhone (see how all the posts are tying together?). I realised I had heard the explosion, but I had thought it was thunder because it was a stormy day and there had been rolling thunder throughout the afternoon.

Steam coming out of the street is no strange occurrence here. It seeps out of cracks in the bitumen, there are orange tubes channelling it in some streets and vapours are constantly wafting up from the manhole covers. The photos above were from my walk to work this morning in Midtown.

I like to think that under the city is this crazy mix of the toxic water pipes from Batman Begins, the pink pulsing plasma that thrives on evil from Ghostbusters, ancient rusting steam pipes that melt people from The Bone Collector and molten lava from Dante's Peak.