Forty men went to work inside a tank on February 10, 1973, and none of them came home. The liquefied natural gas storage tank in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Staten Island had been drained ten months earlier -- or so Texas Eastern Transmission Pipeline claimed. The workers were sealing cracks in the tank's plastic lining, a routine maintenance job inside a 108-foot-tall concrete cylinder that could hold 660,000 barrels. Then something ignited. A plume of combusting gas rose through the tank, and the massive concrete cap lifted 20 feet into the air before crashing back down on the men below. Only two workers, positioned near the top of the tank, felt the heat in time to scramble to scaffolding outside. The other forty were crushed beneath granite slabs and debris.
The neighborhoods of Rossville and Bloomfield had become a landscape of industrial gas storage by the early 1970s. In 1970, Distrigas announced plans for nine enormous tanks in Rossville, each holding 37.8 million gallons. Two were built before opposition mounted. By 1971, Staten Islanders were pushing back against a buildup they saw as reckless. MIT mechanical-engineering professor James A. Fay had warned that storing both liquefied natural gas and naphtha at the site was extremely dangerous. The concerns were prescient but ultimately too late for the forty workers inside the TETCo tank that Saturday morning.
Recovery was agonizing. Granite slabs from the tank's collapsed roof blocked access to the bodies below, and the site remained hazardous with pockets of gas still present. The last body was not recovered until February 22, twelve days after the explosion. Some of the dead could only be identified by personal effects -- rings, watches, and bracelets pulled from the wreckage. The scale of the disaster overwhelmed Staten Island. It was, and remains, the worst industrial accident in the borough's history.
Gas industry experts quickly blamed a "construction accident," insisting the explosion could not have been caused by residual gas. TETCo claimed the tank's plastic liner was not flammable. Scientists at the United States Bureau of Mines tested that claim by building a scale model of the tank and setting it alight. The model burned in a manner strikingly similar to the real thing. In 1974, TETCo was charged with 40 counts of negligent homicide. Lawsuits from the victims' estates began arriving in December 1973, and by 1976, courts had settled 33 civil cases for a combined $11 million -- a figure that worked out to less than $300,000 per life lost.
The explosion triggered an immediate moratorium on liquefied natural gas storage facilities across New York State. Two partially built tanks in Rossville were abandoned. The Public Service Electric and Gas Company tried to use those tanks in the early 1980s but dropped its plans in 1984 after renewed community opposition. The statewide ban held for more than four decades, finally repealed in January 2015 -- except within New York City, where it remained in effect. The site of the explosion was cleared in 1993. Since then, the land where forty men died has sat empty and unused, a quiet patch of ground in a borough that has never forgotten what happened there.
Located at 40.62N, 74.19W in the Bloomfield neighborhood of western Staten Island. From the air, the site sits near the Arthur Kill waterway separating Staten Island from New Jersey. The area is industrial with visible tank farms and infrastructure along the waterfront. Nearest airports: Newark Liberty International (KEWR) approximately 6 nm northwest, and Linden Airport (KLDJ) 5 nm southwest. Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL for the industrial corridor context.