There are only a few things that could have started these fires. Either live overhead electric wires or a natural gas explosion. There is only one kind of flame that burns through water and that is a natural gas explosion. Once ignited the wind did the rest.
With homes built so close together there has to be special considerations to these tragedies.
To begin, electric wires belong underground and not overhead. Electric sources have to be cut off when such problems manifest. This is very near the water so it will happen again.
This is an opportunity to get it right and make people more safe. If there was natural gas lines in the housing development it needs to be rethought. Realizing these homes are near each other, it is imprudent to put natural gas lines under these streets and homes.
My vision are houses fashionably on stilts as any beach community is designed with break away under-structures if hit with floods. They need to be state of the art solar homes with underground electric lines as a supplement to the home.
Breezy Point was lucky this time. No one died.
Residents (click here) of the tight knit beach enclave of Breezy Point, Queens, sometimes known as the "Irish Riviera" for its overwhelming ethnic makeup, picked through the ashes of more than 100 homes destroyed by fire Monday night and contemplated the future of the once-placid getaway ravished by Sandy.
Hundreds more homes suffered flood damage and dozens of houses were swept off their foundations, officials said.
At the same time, stories of neighbor helping neighbor abounded amid flooded streets, pancaked beach houses that lined a battered promenade and the entire cluster of dozens of homes known as "the wedge" leveled by the fire that was still smoldering Tuesday....
