In Ellenville, meanwhile, people have been looking for signs of damage to a Center Street home that witnessed a major gas explosion when a woman put water on her apartment kitchen's stove to make pasta on Saturday, July 7.

Now, a week later, virtually nothing of the 65-year-old diner in Kerhonkson remains standing but its sign, which remains by the side of the road where it bore witness to the conflagration. According to published reports, it was a grease fire which did the diner in, starting in the kitchen late Monday morning, July 2. Owner George Haralabopoulos was on premises at the time, and called 911 himself.

What happened next was driven by a series of bad circumstances.

There aren't any fire hydrants near the diner, so fire departments had to bring in their own tanker trucks to fight the blaze. In all, some fifteen departments responded to the call, closing Route 209 for several hours. The firefighters on hand were unable to quell the flames, though, because it was unsafe to get inside the building. The fire had gotten above the diner's dropped ceiling, and there was a very real risk of the building collapsing.

Since all employees and patrons were safely evacuated, the fire was only fought from outside. Ultimately, an excavator was called in to tear the structure down. Five hours of flames had left nothing worth saving.

In Ellenville several hot days later, Diane Campbell had just moved in to her new apartment at 49 Center Street, Ellenville, when around 12 noon on Saturday, July 7, she put a pan of water on the stove to boil and make some pasta.

"I went into the other room and sat down," she recalled this week. "The next moment, boom, the windows all blew out and the stove exploded."

Campbell, interviewed outside the building, which was temporarily condemned and sealed off with yellow tape, said that the previous Thursday she had smelled gas. A plumber had come but said everything was fine.

"This is a nightmare," she added about being left temporarily homeless with her dog, and wondering what she should do next.

"The building has not been condemned. That was incorrect," noted the structure's landlord, James Barrascano of Nanuet, in a separate, later interview. "I have permission to restore the building and I'm working on getting that apartment repaired. The arson investigator said it was accidental. However, I'm eliminating propane entirely and going to make the building all electric."

Back in Kerhonkson this week, Rochester Town Supervisor Carl Chipman noted, "We've lost a landmark... That diner was part of the social fabric of our town. A lot of families made Sunday breakfast there a ritual, or had dinner there as their only night out."

The diner was also a big part of the social fabric of its staff, according to one employee who declined to give her name.

"My daughter grew up here," she said as she was looking at the wreckage of the place she'd worked off and on for the past fifteen years at what was originally called Bendell's Diner when built by Henry Bendell in the 1950s, and rechristened the Rainbow when Haralabopoulos bought it in 1986. "All of our kids did. It was like my second house."

Looking at the barely-recognizable remains of canned goods still stacked on a basement storage shelf, she added, "As long as nobody got hurt, that's what counts."

One firefighter suffered a sprained ankle, but there were no other reports of injuries associated with the fire.... Or the Ellenville explosion.