Gas Fire

EL PASO, Texas -- Some residents on El Paso's east side are without gas after construction workers hit a four-inch gas line, igniting a huge fireball.

"It was just an explosion and it shook the whole neighborhood, it shook the house," said Jerry Martinez, who captured the whole thing on his home video camera.

"We were like, 'wow, what was that,' and we looked over to see what it was, and that's when we noticed, yeah, the area had already caught on fire," said Martinez.

As the fire raged on, it grew bigger, and bigger.

"It's pretty amazing, I have never seen anything like that myself," Martinez told KFOX.

Firefighters couldn't do anything other than to keep the flames from spreading. It was later determined that construction workers building an elementary school struck the four-inch gas line.

The Texas Gas Service said gas leaks are not uncommon, but them catching fire almost never takes place.

"It is very rare that we do have ignition, it doesn't happen very often, I don't recall really, I think it's been several years since we've had ignition," said Pete Parraz with Texas Gas Service.

Martinez's home is only a few hundred feet from where the gas line break happened, and he's glad that everyone in his family is OK.

"My little boy, they were like, they were kind of hysterical saying, 'Are we going to be OK?' we were just trying to calm them down, making sure that they were OK," said Martinez.

Fire officials said the cause of the blaze is static electricity. Firefighters tell KFOX they only had to evacuate one home nearby, and the Texas Gas Service said about 350 homes were affected by the gas leak. They had extra crews on hand to help get gas back up and running for those residents.

SOURCE (http://www.kfoxtv.com/news/15951174/detail.html)



There's a video of the report + fire on the website, but I couldn't get it to embed.


:blowup:

Shit. I've seen the end result of a good few gas line strikes, but never seen one light up yet, thankfully. The odds of hitting the line just right and causing a spark before the emergency shutoff valves activate and the line purges out are just unreal.

Even when they hit the 16" one near my old place, we didn't get a good kaboom like we could've, but you could smell the gas in the air for days after. It was enough to overpower the smell of curry that permeated the district since it was first built.

We had one open up in the early '90s in Indy. It caused a small explosion. It seems to happen when they are putting up a new housing subdivision. A 16" pipe? That would make a big boom,CJ.