Chinie Rios was busily at work inside Rios’ Engraving on Thursday afternoon when she heard a startling sound.
“Boom!” she said. “I thought maybe it was an accident. Then I saw smoke.”
The smoke was coming from a grate in the sidewalk outside her Morristown shop, on the Market Street side of the Maple Avenue intersection.
She called police right away. “Remember the library!” she said.
The Morristown & Township Library, about three blocks away, was rocked by an explosion–still not solved–last May 3, after a series of incidents involving exploding manhole covers.
Nothing blew into the air this time.
A spokesman for Jersey Central Power & Light said an underground circuit wire tripped, and some steam escaped through the sidewalk vent.
“It’s like a circuit-breaker in your house. It went offline,” said the spokesman, Ron Morano. There were no power outages, he said, adding that the incident is under investigation.
Chinie said police and fire personnel responded swiftly to her 3:30 pm call. She said the last incident near her shop involving underground utilities was about 20 years ago.
In October, nearby Bank Street was briefly evacuated after a contractor hit an unmarked gas line.
