Richard Liebson's final byline from 2019: What it was like to cover the 287 tanker crash

Editor's note: In 2019, for the 25th anniversary of the 1994 propane tanker explosion on I-287 in White Plains, veteran Journal News/lohud reporter Richard Liebson wrote a column about what it was like to cover the story. Liebson, one of our best known and most respected journalists, died the day after the anniversary, on July 28, 2019, from cancer at 61 . We're bringing out his final byline again for the 30th anniversary.

In 1994 I had been a reporter at The Journal News for about 15 years. I had covered natural disasters including floods, nor'easters, and massive blizzards. I had been to horrific murder scenes and fatal traffic accidents. But what I saw in White Plains on July 27 of that year was unlike anything I had seen before.

The call from the news desk came in as a possible plane crash. The adrenaline began to flow as I raced to the scene a few minutes from my apartment. I parked on North Broadway near Grant Avenue and began walking down the avenue toward the Interstate 287 overpass. The farther I walked, the more I realized that this was very different from a plane crash.

There were the scorched trees and small fires. Dozens of people were running around aimlessly in their pajamas with terrified looks on their faces asking each other “Do you know what happened?” “What’s going on?” “Is anybody hurt?” Many had seen balls of fire in the air.

Further down there was more destruction, with houses heavily damaged and some people still trapped inside waiting to be rescued. By then there were hundreds of people milling about, still trying to figure out what was going on.

As I reached the end of the bridge I saw Fire Chief John Cullen, the concern clear on his sweat-covered face. There were at least four houses fully engulfed in flames on either side of the freeway. Cullen pointed down to an unrecognizable blob of steel that was once a propane truck. He told me it hit one of the bridge’s support columns 200 yards down the freeway and slid to where we saw it now. “I don’t think anyone could have survived that,” he said.

I-287 was filled with police cars, fire engines and ambulances, as were Hall Avenue and neighboring streets. The flashing lights gave off an eerie glow as they reflected across the scared faces of the people who lived there.

Soon, the police were calming people and moving them away from the bridge and back toward North Broadway. Word got out: a propane truck had smashed into an I-287 overpass. The Grant Avenue bridge was damaged and appeared to be unusable.

'No one who saw it could believe it'

I headed back up the avenue. Police were having a tough time moving people away as crowds surged forward to see the damage. There was a lot of noise — people shouting, fires roaring, dogs barking, children crying and engines rumbling. Static crackled from first responders’ radios. The sirens of emergency vehicles still on North Broadway seemed muted and far away.

On nearby Clinton Street, parts of the truck’s huge propane tank lay between two burning houses. The tank had taken off like a rocket when the truck hit the bridge hundreds of yards away. No one who saw it could believe it. “It was like a missile,” one woman said. “It left fireballs everywhere it passed.”

Barricades were set up at Grant Avenue and Morningside. That’s where Rocky Magnotta of 66 Grant Avenue told me how he and a group of strangers carried his ladder to a burning house and helped five people escape.

Volunteers from the Red Cross and Salvation Army helped victims find places to stay and passed out coffee, doughnuts and pink lemonade to victims, exhausted emergency workers and just about everyone else.

In the end, fires on either side of the freeway left the propane truck driver dead, two dozen people injured and five houses destroyed. Seventeen other homes in the area of Grant Avenue and Clinton Street were heavily damaged.

One lane of the Grant Avenue bridge was opened in 1995, but only allowed traffic out of White Plains. In 2009, it was reopened in both directions as a part of the $150 million reconstruction of I-287 that replaced or rebuilt several spans of the thruway.

For several years after the disaster, I would occasionally drive through the neighborhood looking for signs of a return to normalcy. Over time, the debris was removed, most empty lots were cleaned up and various home repairs of different sizes took place. A few new homes were built and a handful of new families moved in.

One day I saw a few people gathered in front of a garden chatting. A firetruck came rumbling down the street and stopped in front of them. Two firemen clambered out, climbed a tree and rescued a very frightened cat. Normalcy had returned to Grant Avenue.

This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Richard Liebson's final byline from 2019: What it was like to cover the 287 tanker crash