No asbestos found from Midtown steam pipe leak: officials

MIDTOWN EAST (PIX11) -- Many blocks on the east side of Midtown Manhattan remain closed as cleanup continues following a massive steam pipe leak that started in the early morning hours of Wednesday. The emergency is expected to continue affecting thousands of residents for most of the rest of the week. 

Mayor Eric Adams held a brief news conference Wednesday evening near the mobile command center for the emergency. The pipe leak was located at 52nd Street and Second Avenue, and the command center is two blocks north. 

"We don't have any[one] reported injured, thank God," he said, "and we're gonna continue monitoring the situation." 

That monitoring includes looking for the cause of the leak which, at its height, shut down nearly 50 blocks of Midtown East to traffic.

The plume from the leak rose as high as the 20-story buildings at or near the intersection. It first started leaking around 2 a.m., according to the city's Office of Emergency Management, and then grew to its maximum intensity around 5 a.m. Workers from Con Edison, which owns the steam pipe, were able to cap it around 6:40 a.m., OEM said. 

The frozen zone shrank throughout the day, but by nightfall, it still extended from 42nd Street to 54th Street on the south and north, respectively, and from Second Avenue to Lexington Avenue. 

A woman who lives at the intersection where the pipe was expressed serious concern. 

"It's really scary, because our window faces Second Avenue," said the resident, who only gave her first name, Robin. "We've been just watching smoke and steam coming up, and it's very, very scary."

She was responding to the layer of dust and debris on cars, awnings, and other surfaces within a block of the leak. 

The city's Office of Emergency Management warned that the debris could have spread beyond the immediate area, and was not visible to the naked eye. 

The agency's concern was that the debris could contain asbestos or other harmful substances.

However, at the evening news conference, Mayor Adams and Zachary Iscol, the emergency management commissioner, said that initial air quality testing showed no sign of asbestos. 

Still, they called for residents to keep windows closed and stay inside as much as possible. 

That directive had an effect on businesses in the Turtle Bay and Midtown East neighborhoods, where the emergency was centered. Many of those businesses had managed to come back from the depths of the pandemic, and residents said that they don't want anything stopping that now.

"If it's something like a pipe exploding, with asbestos," said Caitlin Brennan, who lives down the block from the steam pipe rupture, "it would really just be the cyanide cherry on the cake." 

Past steam pipe emergencies have been worse than the one on Wednesday. One in 2007, near Grand Central Terminal, killed a woman and injured 45 people. Another one, in the Flatiron District in 2018, displaced 500 residents for days. 

Because this latest emergency is a pipe leak, as opposed to a full-scale explosion, as was the case in 2018 and 2007, there's no displacement, according to Commissioner Iscol. He also said that rain, which is forecasted into Thursday, will help to wash away the debris.

The total cleanup effort, he said, should "take a few days."