I wonder if non-New Yorkers can appreciate how it feels to look up in the sky and see a vast plume of black smoke billowing into the air. A friend of mine IM’d me from a few blocks away and said, “28,000 New Yorkers are now going back into therapy.” It seems that it was just an industrial accident, but when I saw it, the first thing I thought of was a story a private pilot friend of mine in Louisiana told me right after 9/11.
He and his buddies were approached at their hangar in the week or two after the 9/11 attacks by a European (Austrian, as I recall) who asked them to take him up to photograph the refineries along the Mississippi River. It startled the men, because they all pilot ultralight aircraft, and not too many people know where their private hangar is. This Euro did. The pilots played dumb, and asked the guy to come back the next day and they’d take him up. Then they called the FBI. When the European returned the next day, the Feds arrested him.
I was later told via a local law enforcement source that this cat was on an international wanted list, but I couldn’t confirm that. Point is, our enemies are watching our refineries. That’s why the first thing I thought of when I saw the fire was: “Terrorism.”