It’s been 15 years since my newspaper somewhat prematurely announced the end of the world.

The occassion was the accident in which a trucker, apparently running on too little sleep, slammed his rig into the side of the Grant Avenue bridge over Interstate 287, launching his 9,200-gallon propane tank into a White Plains neighborhood.

The resulting fireball was dramatic — almost apocalyptic, according to the people who lived through it. Our headline the next day in The Journal News read “The end of the world.” It was in quote marks, of course. We were only using what someone on the scene said in order to show just how big a deal this was.

And indeed it was a big deal. The trucker was killed, 23 people were injured. I wasn’t even here; I was visiting a friend in California and I read about the accident and the fireball it caused in the Los Angeles Times.

Still, I’d always thought the headline was a bit much. Until I went to report the story in today’s paper about the reopening (after all these years) of the Grant Avenue bridge as a two-way span.

Claudia Gardner, who was a teenager living in the house destroyed by the propane tank, described it to me the same way: “It was like the end of the world.” And the photographer who accompanied me, Frank Beccerra Jr., described it the same way, “It really was like the end of the world.” Frank is a volunteer firefighter and he’s seen a lot. But this, apparently, was something else.

Some people thought an airplane had crashed in the neighborhood. The tank apparently looked like the body of a jetliner.

Well, now the bridge is replaced as part of a $150 million project to revamp a section of I-287 through the middle of Westchester.

And now that the bridge is opened and the article is written, we probably won’t have many more occassions to revisit the 1994 accident. That’s not a bad thing. We all know how news organizations just love to rehash stuff on major anniversaries and for any other reason.

We’re guilty of it, too, of course. (Have you read enough yet about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock?)

But we’ll probably leave this one alone now that, in a neighborhood in White Plains that once burned throughout a summer night, life has returned to normal.