Deadly doses of poisonous carbon monoxide spewing from a burning Con Ed manhole nearly killed two women after it spread across a sidewalk and seeped into their Brooklyn homes yesterday.
The potentially lethal fumes sickened seven other people and forced some 300 residents into the streets for hours, fire officials said.
The two seriously injured women were found unconscious by firefighters going door to door along 55th Street in Sunset Park.
One of them was found in a brownstone basement; the other in the third-floor apartment of another building.
At least one resident insisted the fire had burned for 12 hours before Con Ed took steps to put it out, a claim the utility denied.
Con Ed spokeswoman Joy Faber could not say why so much carbon monoxide was emitted without it being detected earlier, and declined to comment on whether the thousands of manholes monitored by the utility pose an ongoing risk to New Yorkers .
Fire Battalion Chief William Tanzosh said the toxic fumes in some locations on the affected streets topped 133 times the safe level for carbon-monoxide emissions.
Among the seven people sickened were two FDNY paramedics, who rescued the two unconscious women shortly after receiving a 911 call at around noon.
“The only reason the unconscious people were found this quickly was because of [a 911 caller] who had a carbon-monoxide detector,” Tanzosh said.
“That’s what started the ball rolling. If that call didn’t come in, things would have been a lot worse.”
All of the sickened were in stable condition last night.
Danny Venuto, who lives in one of the 58 buildings that were evacuated, said he and others complained to Con Edison of a smoking manhole on Saturday night – only to be told to wait it out.
“We called Con Ed. They said for us to wait 12 to 16 hours, Venuto said. “This is what happens when you wait.”
But Faber insisted the company first heard complaints of a smoking manhole at around noon. She did say the utility got calls of sporadic power outages along 55th Street at 8 a.m.
She said the matter was under review, but speculated that rock salt may have found its way inside the manhole and corroded electrical wires that eventually caught on fire.
Chief Tanzosh said the gas and smoke got into the residences through underground electrical conduits.
Meters indicated that the emissions on the third floor of 5502 Seventh Ave., where the second woman was found unconscious, were at 1,200 parts per million, fire officials said. Anything over 9 is considered dangerous.
In the residence where the first woman was found in the basement, at 613 55th St., fire officials said the carbon-monoxide count was 900 parts per million.
“We’re lucky they caught this,” said one evacuated resident., who asked that his name not be printed. “This is a long block with a lot of kids on it. That comes at night when people are home and sleeping, they might have died.”