Immediately after the arrival of Acting Chief Inspector Dillon, who directed the police reserves, called from all parts of Manhattan and the Bronx, tenants were ordered to quit the houses in Seventh Avenue from Twenty-third to Twenty-fifth Streets until the authorities decided whether it was safe for them to return. At 7 o’clock at night they were permitted to return to their homes.
Acting Police Inspector Joseph Conroy, in conjunction with officials of the construction company, sent policemen at night throughout the five boroughs to the homes of 200 employes on the company’s payroll. All of the men were accounted for except two--J. X. Zavina of 300 Avenue A and John McCormick of 317 Bowery. McCormick had been reported dead earlier in the day. At the address given for Zavina it was said that no man of that name lived there.
The Seventh Avenue car service was suspended south of Thirty-second Street, and it will be at least a week, it is said, before service is resumed below that point.
The thousands of spectators who crowded as near the great cavity as they could during the morning and gave the police reserves a hard task at the danger zone ropes, became alarmed when it was reported that dynamite was still beneath the fallen structure and that more explosions might follow. Twelve sticks of unexploded dynamite were carried up at one time, and the firemen took charge of it.
The engineers later said that there was no more dynamite in the cavity, and that the twelve sticks had been carried down early in the morning by a powder man who was to explode them in small blasts after the big explosion at 8 o’clock. The rules were strict regarding the handling of dynamite, the company officials said, and they were sure that there was no further danger to the lives of the rescuers after the twelve sticks had been taken out.
Colonel William Hayward of the Public Service Commission stood at the edge of the great hole and pointed to the crumpled wooden car.
“Look at that car,” he said. “That’s what we ought to investigate, for before you is a picture of what is going to happen when one of the old wooden cars on the elevated takes a jump to the street. I fought against those old cars going on the elevated, but I was voted down. I will always fight them or any other sort of wooden cars for New York traffic.