Brooklyn Boom.

Took this picture last night at Chelsea Piers - played around quite a bit to see which settings worked best for a scene like this & this was the best result.

Tonight was a weird night.

I was walking home from taking a first aid class in Brooklyn Heights (this was in preparation for the British Canoe Union 2-star coach training which I don't get to do after all owing to the fact that another member of my very short-staffed department beat me to asking for those 2 days off - #$@&!!! - and I was SO excited about doing that!), heading up Atlantic to catch the Q train, when something went "boom".

Just one boom. Quite loud. A child across the street cried "Fireworks!"

I just kept walking, wondering if something bad had happened.

A couple of firetrucks & ambulances went by - that was all. I took that as a good sign. If it had been something bad, every emergency vehicle in Brooklyn would have been on the way. Other than that, everything stayed normal. The subway was operating normally, and WQXR was playing classical music when I got home half an hour later, and I can't find a single mention of a Brooklyn explosion online, so it can't have been what I was afraid it was.

It is definitely hot. Maybe it was a transformer or something. Still left my stomach tied in a bit of a knot.

The class was good. The teacher, Flo, is an EMT & works out of Coney Island Hospital so she's seen a lot & knew her stuff. She was very tired 'cause she'd worked a long day already, so she really moved it along nicely & kept it lively to keep all of us awake - she had a great way of adding in descriptions that really drove points home (like clarifying why you use warm water, not hot, to thaw out frostbite, by asking us "What happens when you drop an ice cube in a hot cup of tea?" - well, just think about that - now imagine that the ice cube is a frozen finger - OUCH, huh?). Take a first aid class at the Brooklyn branch of the Red Cross & it sounds like you're likely to get her - I really thought she was good. Funny too. Nice for a first aid instructor to have the ability to give her students the occasional tension-relieving laughter in the midst of the discussions of the differentiations between venous & arterial bleeding & where heat exhaustion crosses the border into heat stroke.

Every time I go for first aid or CPR with a new instructor, it always seems like something different stands out & lodges in my memory. Now I wish I was CPR/AED in Brooklyn too, but that's in Manhattan on Saturday. Oh well, I've never had a first aid or cpr class where I didn't think the instructor knew their stuff - Flo's teaching style just seemed to work really well for me. There was no question in my mind that I'd go ahead with both of these classes even though I wouldn't be attending the course for which they were a prerequisite after all - those certifications are just good things to have.

Well, 11:30, 2 hours after the boom, radio's still playing classical music - that boom must have been something relatively innocuous, as booms go.

9:30 am Wednesday update - No news is good news, and I found no news on this this morning, so as I was saying last night, must not have been anything bad. There were articles about how North Brooklyn residents were being asked to cut their power use as much as possible because various cables were getting overloaded - maybe it was a transformer blowing. Whatever it was, it must be that nobody got hurt.

Speaking of hot - yesterday morning I passed a bunch of subway workers who appeared to be gathering prior to going to work in the tunnels. Boy, I may whine about my job sometimes - but really, there are worse ways of earning a living.