A small, low-flying helicopter heading toward Manhattan with a flying instructor and his student snagged a power line, cartwheeled in midair and crashed in flames on a busy elevated-highway approach to the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey Thursday, killing the two people on board.
No one on the ground was killed or injured, but the crash set off a chain reaction of fires that engulfed scores of cars in a commuters' parking lot under the highway. Effects of the accident rippled far beyond the site of the crash itself, causing power failures in 10 New Jersey communities and an interstate traffic jam that affected tens of thousands of commuters.The cause of the crash was not immediately determined, but officials said the helicopter, a two-seat Robinson-22 that had taken off from Teterboro Airport six miles to the northeast, was apparently no more than 150 feet in the air when its rotor hit the power line and it spun down to a fiery death.
Terrified witnesses - motorists, children in a nearby school, workers in an industrial area laced with cloverleaf roads and rail and power lines - told of explosions and fireballs as the chopper came down, skipped and broke apart on Interstate 495 a mile west of the Lincoln Tunnel in North Bergen at 12:50 p.m.
"It hit the wire and just came tumbling down right in front of my car," said Frank DePinto, 20. "I just slammed on the brakes so I wouldn't hit it. It just kept burning. Vehicles were zigzagging all over the place, trying to get out of the way."
Alexander Gichan, who saw it from his wood-recycling business, said, "It was like three blasts of lightning. The white bursts had to be a hundred feet wide." His brother, Greg, added: "It was like a rock skipping on the water, like a fireball bouncing on 495. I thought it was a bus. It was that big."
As blazing wreckage, a live power line and volatile fuel cascaded onto a park-and-ride lot 60 feet below the elevated crash site, fires broke out and explosions erupted, incinerating 25 vehicles, damaging 53 others and turning the lot into a war zone of smoldering ruins where commuters later wandered gloomily in search of Grand Ams and BMWs that had become blackened hulks.
Meantime, the downed power line knocked out a Public Service Electric & Gas substation in Jersey City, and electricity failed briefly in 15,750 homes and businesses.
As police and emergency vehicles rushed to the scene, the authorities shut down some of the main traffic arteries linking New York City and New Jersey.
The resulting traffic tie-ups spread out through Manhattan and much of northern New Jersey in the afternoon, forcing a diversion of traffic.
As federal, state and local authorities began investigating the crash, officials said its timing, with midday traffic at an ebb on a six-lane highway that is a bumper-to-bumper nightmare during most weekday rush periods, may have spared many deaths or injuries.