For those of you lucky suburbanites who weren't in New York yesterday, things sure started to get a little crazy around 5:57pm!

See, a steam-pipe 24 inches in diameter burst just outside of Grand Central, causing a boom, a weird, loud rumbling sound, and millions of pounds of pressurized steam, debris (and possibly asbestos!) to fling out of the ground, yielding awkward—yet completely mesmerizing—local news footage ("It's, like, a—a giant crater!" reported ABC's baffled on-air newsperson).

And that was just the beginning.

In the aftermath of the chaos were scores of Con Ed workers running around in shiny orange jumpsuits and lighted hardhats, one reported fatality, twenty-some odd people injured by flying debris (or asbestos) and hundreds of pissed off rich banker types evacuated from their fancy Midtown offices, grumbling, "But, the markets are already open in Australia!" and then overheard bitching about how to get all the way to the Upper East Side without the use of the 4, 5 or 6 trains.

Thankfully, Mayor Bloomberg eventually restored order with a long, boring drawn-out announcement, and eventually the steam/asbestos mixture stopped pumping out of the street at an alarming rate.

We're just glad things are finally back to normal, and that no one turned this (thankfully!) smallish-scale interruption into the giant, sensationalism news story it so obviously isn't.