Holland Tunnel fire

On the morning of May thirteenth, nineteen forty-nine, the Holland Tunnel became the site of a disaster that tested its very structural limits. A truck carrying eighty drums of highly flammable carbon disulfide, a chemical strictly banned from the tunnel, entered the South Tube from Jersey City. When one of the drums bounced off the truck and ruptured on the roadway, the leaking vapors ignited instantly against the hot metal of the vehicle, creating a fire that reached temperatures estimated at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit.