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Kind: captions
Language: en

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The Avenue of the Americas! One of the most important streets in New York.

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Over there is the famous Radio City Music Hall.

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And over there are two canisters of liquid nitrogen, sitting entirely undefended on the street.

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And yes, that sounds a little bit odd

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There are plenty of folks walking by and wondering "should those be there?"

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And, plenty more folks walking by and not noticing them at all.

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So it seems strange, and I looked it up

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And it turns out, they belong to one of the phone companies

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See there's a lot of steam, and water, underground in New York

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From municipal heating systems, and water pipes, and all sorts of things

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And those phone wires can get very very wet and, well, fall apart

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Every three days, someone from the phone company comes around here,

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replaces those canisters of liquid nitrogen with new ones,

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and that nitrogen is constantly vented through the tunnels that contain the phone wires

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in order to keep them dry, and away from oxygen and moistness.

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The coldness is just a side-effect of how you need to store that much nitrogen.

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And, well, it seems unsafe, doesn't it?

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But, I looked it up, and there have apparently never been any incidents with it,

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and in the event that one of the many, many vehicles on this busy, busy road crashes into them,

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apparently it'd just cause a little bit of venting and outgassing.

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It seems strange, but there are many things in every city that seem strange,

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and liquid nitrogen on the streets is one of the minor ones.

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Welcome to New York.

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