Explosive interlude on a summer weekend
Andrew Mitrovica
The Star (Toronto)
Sep 11, 2007
On Saturday Sept. 1, Toronto averted a catastrophe. You can search in vain for news reports about the near tragedy.
Politicians and city officials have not commented on the incident that threatened to engulf a neighbourhood. But it did happen.
How do I know? I was among the many adults, children and homes that could have been blown up.
I usually write on this page about the scourge of terrorism and how ill-prepared our security services are to address that danger. But terrorists had nothing to do with this traumatic event; a building contractor did.
And now, it seems, he will escape with little more than a dent in his pocket book and a letter from the regulatory body that is supposed to protect us from such dangerous irresponsibility.
This is a cautionary tale that every Torontonian should heed.
Late that morning I was writing in my modest semi-detached home in north Toronto when there was a thunderous knocking at the front door.
At first, I thought an overzealous pair of religious pamphleteers was making yet another impromptu visit. Instead, I found a short, balding fireman racing from door to door. "Get out of the house. Now!" he shouted. "There's a major gas leak." (Thankfully, my two young daughters and wife were out of town.)
It turned out that a contractor - who was building a fence - had ruptured a gas line metres from my home. As I scampered down the street I heard the roar of the natural gas spewing from the earth.
The scene was unnerving not just for me, but for my neighbours. We anxiously watched as a once languid day quickly turned into a nightmare. Police cordoned off several streets and evacuated a neighbourhood brimming with children. An ambulance bus and paramedics arrived and several large trucks carrying repair equipment rumbled in to repair the pipeline.
As we waited, my neighbours and I traded stories about our harried escape. A young couple living next door to the ruptured gas line had been enjoying lunch in their backyard while their 18-month-old son slept inside their new home, blissfully unaware (they thought the roar was a power washer). Indeed, the couple reckoned they waited close to 40 minutes before being alerted to the danger.
The trauma and threat to property and, more importantly, lives, was, of course, avoidable. Ontario law requires home owners, contractors and excavators to call gas utilities to locate and mark the gas lines before they dig. The service is free and only takes a few days to be done.
A spokesperson for the utility that services my street confirmed to me that the contractor didn't call. So, presumably in order to save a little time and money, the fence builder chose to guess, putting a community at risk.
That afternoon, good work by the utility and police and fire departments prevented a potentially catastrophic explosion. Others, regrettably, have not been so fortunate.
Pipeline ruptures remain disturbingly routine in Ontario. Last year, there were 3,500 such incidents. In most cases, human error is the cause. And these errors can have deadly consequences. In one incident in Toronto in 2003, for example, seven people were killed and scores injured apparently after a construction worker inadvertently hit a gas line.
That same year, this newspaper's crack investigative reporter Robert Cribb raised the alarm. Cribb revealed that few of the incidents were investigated and only a handful of cases resulted in prosecutions by the Technical Standards and Safety Authority (TSSA) which regulates pipelines in Ontario. Cribb wrote that the TSSA had a "hands off" approach to regulation. Four years later, that disquieting attitude and record have not changed.
In its mind-numbing logic, the TSSA has decided against prosecuting or even fining the fence builder. Rather, the regulator told me in an email, it has "deemed the most appropriate action was to issue orders to the contractor to address the non-compliances found."
Translation: no charges and no fines, just a letter asking him to do what he should have done before he stuck a shovel into the ground. All this, despite the fact that the TSSA acknowledged in the same email that its so-called "investigation" had "determined that failure to obtain locates was the root cause of the incident." The regulator added, laughably, that "as an educational component, the contractor was also made aware of his requirements and responsibilities."
I'm not reassured.
I take little solace knowing that the utility intends to charge the contractor for the lost gas and costs associated with the repair. Pipelines can be replaced; people can't. This lesson still appears lost on the TSSA. By the way, the TSSA's motto is: "Putting Public Safety First."
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 12 Sep 2007