About 20 minutes after the first explosions, as ambulances fought through traffic and the police shouted to control the panicked crowd, a car bomb blew up a block away, sending up a tower of flame but injuring no one.
It was a perfect launch that saw the Soyuz lift into the sky on a tower of flame at 11.03am GMT and give chase to the space station, which had soared overhead three minutes earlier.
In what appeared to be a perfect launch, the rocket rose on a tower of flame into the sky above the Kazakh steppe and gave chase to the space station.
"There was a tower of flame," Sinclair writes, "and the most amazing spectacle — the burning oil would hit the ground, and bounce up, and explode, and leap again and fall again, and great red masses of flame would unfold, and burst, and yield black masses of smoke, and these in turn red.
Then, as the rivers receded, a gas main broke and the crater spewed forth a tower of orange flames.
A low helicopter flight over the Kirkuk oilfield, Iraq's second-biggest, presented a scene from the Book of Revelation: each of seven oil wells was marked by a tower of orange flame, meeting in a canopy of dense black smoke.Starker still is the cost in lives.
The space shuttle Atlantis rocketed off its seaside launching pad, rising atop a tower of smoke and flames as it left Earth on the shuttle program's final flight.
The space shuttle Atlantis rocketed off its seaside launching pad on Friday, rising atop a tower of smoke and flames as it left Earth on the shuttle program's final flight.
A 300-foot tower of flames wiped out an entire subdivision, according to the Post.
Gas began flowing upward and some spark -- no one knows exactly -- ignited it into a whooshing tower of flame.
