This is the dramatic moment an explosion caused by an underground electrical fire sent a manhole cover spinning hundreds of feet into the air.
Footage captured by news channel WGRZ-TV shows the metal disc go flying "200 or 300 feet" into the sky, threatening to land on the cars and people below.
It was one of three blasts caused by the blaze yesterday. Fortunately, no one is reported to have been hurt.
Buildings in the New York street including a children's centre and a church were evacuated as news of the fire spread, but the explosion appeared to take place metres from cars and firefighters, who looked up frantically as a bystander screamed: "Heads up! Heads up!"
It comes nearly a fortnight after a pair of similar incidents in London. A manhole cover exploded in Finsbury Park on April 1, hours after the outbreak of the underground blaze that shut Kingsway for more than a week and saw furnaces erupting from the street.
The cause of the fire - which shut theatre shows and a Tube station, cut power for days and saw houses, shops and offices evacuated - was later said by fire chiefs to be an electrical fault beneath the road.
"We were pretty much evacuating the building," a witness to yesterday's explosion in Tupper Street, Buffalo, told WGRZ-TV seconds before the blast. "We were waiting for the children to finish..."
At that moment the manhole cover flies into the air behind him with a loud bang, turning heads and sending the camera momentarily off-balance.
"The first manhole was a little but up the street," the witness continued, "but the second one was right on the corner. The fire seems to be coming down the street this way.
"It was definitely startling."
A firefighter added: "I've never seen anything like it. It popped a manhole cover - it must have been 200 [or] 300 feet in the air."
The exact cause of the New York electrical fire is not yet known.
