After nearly a decade indoors, agoraphobic grandmother Janet Faal had finally worked up the courage to leave her home and brave the world outside. Her reward? Two black eyes, a broken leg, and a fall down an open manhole.
ABC7, our favorite source for ridiculously overblown breaking stories, actually did wait until The View ended today before reporting that MANHOLE FIRES had KNOCKED OUT POWER in Greenwich Village, INCLUDING NYU. Which means like one law school dorm and a bodega on 3rd Street. PANIC! Is it terrorism? Sabotage from underpaid Indian foundry workers? Too soon to know but we say YES!
The majority of New York's timeless manhole covers are made by shoeless workers earning dollars a day in an anachronistic West Bengal, India foundry. The workers, pouring 2,500 degree molten metal into those classic ConEd molds, are usually stripped to the waist and bereft of anything resembling protective gear. New York City's Department of Environmental Protection, naturally responding to the world's increasing flatness, said only that "state law requires the city to buy the lowest-priced products available that fit its specifications," and apparently the Indians undercut their competitors, Fagin's Bedraggled Ragamuffin Concern Ltd. of the UK.
