New York City Explosion July 18, 2007 in Grand Central – Steam Pipe + Transformer : Getting the Latest News Update
There was a sudden explosion of a major steam pipe which triggered another explosion of a transformer by Grand Central. Plumes of steam and sudden 9/11 scares rushed through everyone’s mind this evening.
The key is finding out the latest information when news breaks. It used to be that you would flip on CNN or one of the major news networks and WAIT for the emergency interruption news briefs and updates. With the internet, there’s another way to proactively search and find more information faster in the aggregate to give you a better picture of what’s going on right now.
In fact, sources like Google News can give you news articles, photos and videos that were posted as little as 2 minutes ago, to give you really the latest information — without waiting to get through commercials or for the TV news outlets to assemble their teams and write scripts on the fly.
Here’s how to get a listing of basically almost real-time news updates on any major breaking news online:
- Go to http://NEWS.Google.com
- Type in the keywords such as city, name, country or other key identifier that you think will be included in all the headlines if you read it in the newspaper. I used “explosion,” “Manhattan,” and “New York” as my keywords to find out the latest news updates for the NYC explosion.
- You can try a couple of interesting options to help filter the content to get what you want: — BY CONTENT TYPE — text only or IMAGES only; BY TIME — Last Hour, Day, Week or Month.
- Before you start to click away, if Google groups articles together, you can scan all the headlines to get a very quick overview by clicking on the last green link “ALL ### NEWS ARTICLES >>”.
- You’ll also notice that each byline will have the TIME AGO that it was posted to the net to give you a progressive view of the news as it happens.

As you can see, for the “explosion manhattan new york” search on Google News search, links are available to over 718 different articles for the 1st clustering of articles. Some of them have either photos or video as you can tell by the thumbnails posted to the side of the headlines.
It turns out that Homeland Security doesn’t think it’s related in anyway to post-9/11 terrorism. However, Mayor Bloomberg already confirmed one death, dozens injured, some with majority of their body burned. Keep them all in your prayers.
