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No cause for alarm: Smoke on the water

By adamg on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 3:10pm

A large plume of black smoke that rose from the harbor around 2:50 p.m. was merely a cruise ship firing up its diesel engines, Brian D'Amico reports.

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Comments

By ECG on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 3:53pm.

It went on for quite some time and was really filthy and black. We were watching it from a nearby office tower and wondered if it was coming in for an emergency stop due to engine problems. We see a lot of ships out there, but have never seen this before.

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By BostonUrbExRelocatedDueToFlood... on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 4:17pm.

It was running on some of that "clean burning" oil.

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By SwirlyGrrl on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 4:38pm.

They switched over to bunker fuel in the harbor.

Naughty naughty.

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By Anon on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 4:24pm.

How are we sure it wasn't "some stupid with a flare gun"?

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By MattyC on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 4:40pm.

not available for comment.

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By John-W on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 5:43pm.

...Funky Claude is doing much running in and out these days...

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By anon on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 4:25pm.

while i'm glad you clarify all of these false alarms, on an observation, it's really sad that we've become a bunch of people constantly on edge about every bump in the night, plume of smoke, cardboard box. "you can't be too careful," though.

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By ECG on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 4:57pm.

I can only speak for myself and my co-workers: we weren't on edge, just interested to know what was going on. I was glad that Adam posted.

BTW, we see huge cruise ships coming in and out pretty often at this time of year and have never seen black smoke like that!

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By Captain Kangaroo on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 9:21pm.

There were no cruise ships in Boston Harbor today.

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By ECG on Thu, 08/29/2013 - 9:24am.

The ship was big and dark colored--we definitely thought it was some kind of cargo ship. And it was coming into port. When we noticed it (by the smoke) it was accompanied by two tugs. It went into the area by the Conley Terminal/Balck Falcon (we can't see over the Seaport and Black Falcon buildings.)

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By Some Pun on Boston Culture... on Wed, 08/28/2013 - 7:19pm.

I don't really think this is a symptom of that. When people see something weird it's a fairly common reaction to go "what the hell is that?" With modern Internet networking tools, you can express your vague confusion to a wider audience. Similarly, the people who do know what the hell is up (such as the fire department) can easily explain people.

Certainly there's an excess of fear in our culture, but I really don't think this (or things like this) has anything at all to do with that. Some people are curious, other people have explanations, and the Internet is able to connect those people together.

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