Repair work is ongoing in the Harvard Square area of Cambridge, Massachusetts, after multiple manhole explosions there on Wednesday.
On Thursday morning, there was still a gaping hole in the sidewalk along Brattle Street, not far from Felipe's Mexican Taqueria for a frame of reference.
There were three manholes that firefighters had to respond to Wednesday; the first exploded at around 8:30 a.m.
Get Boston local news, weather forecasts, lifestyle and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC Boston’s newsletters.
The Cambridge Fire Department rushed to the scene, where they found a second manhole on fire, before finding smoke billowing from a third hours later. A firefighter was taken to the hospital. No one else was reported injured.
"We were like, 'What's going on,'" Luis Garcia, the manager at Felipe's, said. "We came out of the restaurant and then all of a sudden we saw a lot of smoke coming from next door."
Several businesses will be closed, or at the very least disrupted on Thursday morning. Businesses in the area had to be evacuated Wednesday due to dangerously high levels of carbon monoxide.
CO levels actually reached over 100 parts per million at several venues; OSHA considers any reading over 0 to be worrisome, and anything over 40 to be determinate to health.
“It’s going to take a few days to get to the bottom of it they are going to have to get down to the manholes to determine what happened," Acting Chief of the Cambridge Fire Department Thomas Cahill said. "There are high voltages of electricity flowing six to eight feet underground and until you can get your eyes on it it’s hard to determine a cause.”
The firefighter who was hospitalized is expected to recover.
An investigation is ongoing.
