Walking out of COMMENTARY’s offices yesterday on my way home, I stepped into the street at exactly 6:00 PM. Minutes earlier, a powerful explosion had blown a huge hole in the street at 41st and Lexington Avenue. Reaching the corner of 56th and Lex., I became aware of the blast and could see a huge column of smoke rising into the sky, dwarfing even the skyscrapers surrounding it.

A great many pedestrians were staring straight south. Others were fleeing north. Traffic was at a standstill. Everyone seemed to be dialing cell phones, but with circuits overloaded it was difficult to get through. No one knew what had happened. A colleague I ran into was wondering whether to walk home to Riverdale seven miles to the north or find a hotel room. A policeman I asked told me that it was a manhole explosion, which weirdly turned out to be true, but was in no way commensurate with the power of the blast and the scale of the plume. It took quite a while before word came via the news that it was a ruptured steam pipe and not an al Qaeda summer spectacular, one exquisitely timed to accompany the CIA’s latest warning, issued earlier in the week, about continuing threats to the U.S. homeland.

To those of us who were in New York on September 11, 2001, yesterday’s episode brought back terrifying memories. But it also made many of us more acute observers of what we were experiencing, as if for a second time. My own thoughts were focused on the complete lack of information about what had just happened. To be sure, the authorities themselves were initially in the dark. But what struck me was that there was no single emergency channel on television, radio, the Internet, on PDA’s, etc., to which one could turn for reliable information.

What were we facing? Were the subways functioning? Where should one go? Even if the authorities themselves could not yet answer such questions, it would still have been useful at least to know that they too were in the dark and that we would eventually get from them a steady stream of established facts as they were received. Six years after 9/11, putting in place such an emergency information service is a good idea whose time is past due.