Within ten minutes of the track closure, the crowd in Penn Station started to bulge. It did not happen all at once. The usual trickle of passengers arriving for future departures continued. After twenty minutes, two trains that had boarded but not pulled away from the station let their passengers out of the cars. They pressed back up the stairs and into the station. After an hour, hundreds of people milled around the giant message board in front of the ticketing area. It listed dozens of trains either coming or going. By that time, every status read delayed.
Dispatchers, men and woman inside the Penn Station Control Center, stared at a massive screen across the wall. Over seventy feet wide, it showed the location of every train within a 150-mile radius of the city. Normally, the dispatchers tracked movement. On that day, their mouths hung open at the utter standstill each and every one of them witnessed.
On a typical day, over a thousand trains ran in and out of the station that sat like a labyrinth beneath Madison Square Garden. Hundreds of thousands of commuters filtered in and out aboard trains, boarding subway cars or climbing stairs or escalators to the bustling city above. The dispatchers in the control center were tasked with somehow putting the pieces of this massive and moving puzzle into the right places, all the while knowing that the crowds outside seethed at even a fifteen-minute delay. Every minute that ticked off the giant digital clock above the screen simply stoked their anxiety. They had seen bad days. But few had seen a day worse than that Friday in August.
These dispatchers, more so than most, understood what was about to happen. In a manner of speaking, the fire had dammed up the flow of commuters through Penn Station. Just as water would pool on one side of the blockage, people continued to press into the station. More and more arrived, and fewer and fewer left. First the cavernous center of the station filled to capacity. Then the area around the bookstores, pizza shops, and other vendors. People leaned against walls, milled in thick groups wherever space opened, or dipped their heads, hands cupped over ears, trying to update loved ones on the delay.
Word of the brush fire spread throughout the station, adding to people’s reluctance to leave. Something like that, they thought, might be cleared at any moment. Without simple alternatives, most waited it out as hundreds more arrived. Within an hour, over two thousand people milled around Penn Station, making the best of a bad situation.
By 5:43 P.M., the number of New York City Transit Police there doubled. Men in dark uniforms moved among the crowds, eyes scanning, lips thin. Handlers led trained dogs along the edges, looking for signs of the unthinkable. The temperature rose, and the smell of sweat and damp wool hung in the humid air, clinging to people like cobwebs.
At 5:58, a sharp bark pierced the underlying noise. Voices rose in response. A deep male voice shouted out in alarm, then with a series of orders. People froze from one side of the crowded station to the other. Two minutes later, at 6:00 P.M. sharp, a bomb detonated. The explosion ripped through people and walls alike. Shards of blue plastic from the chairs in the Acela lounge pierced cement-block walls beyond ticketing. Smoke, fire, and chaos swallowed New York’s Penn Station, killing or injuring hundreds instantaneously. The subsequent rupture and explosion of natural gas lines killed even more, and left thousands injured, bleeding, blind, deafened, and changed forever.