The city thinks a major gas leak Thursday morning might have happened because lines were drawn in the wrong location.
A crew was repairing a catch basin on Red River Road Thursday when a backhoe clipped the valve of a Union Gas line under the road.
“There was a small pop which indicated that something was unusual,” city infrastructure manager Darrell Matson said Friday afternoon.
“They immediately stopped work and could smell the gas leak.”
The area around the leak was evacuated for hours as Union gas workers stopped the leak and fixed the line.
An internal city health and safety investigation showed that all necessary steps were in place before the crew started to dig.
An investigation is now underway to look at whether locate lines, drawn by the gas company before the city work began, were in the right place.
A yellow line on Red River Road Friday indicated where the gas line should have been, around 2.5 metres away from where it actually was.
“That’s what we suspect at this time,” Matson said. “So the utility locate marks on the road were slightly off from where the pipe actually existed.”
David Sword, Union Gas’ district manager for Northwestern Ontario, said that the company’s first priority was to make sure the gas leak was stopped and that the line was repaired, all of which has been completed.
“We appreciate everyone’s patience with this incident,” he said as city crews completed the original sewer repairs on Red River Road Friday afternoon.
The company will now cooperate with the Technical Standards and Safety Authority, the Ministry of Labour and the city as the investigation continues. Sword doesn’t know how long that will take.
“It’s hard to say. We do want to make sure it’s thorough and that we get the right answers,” he said.
As for whether the gas company is concerned about similar incidences in the future, Sword said gas leaks are not very common.
“What just occurred is a rare event that takes place. These do not happen very often at all,” he said.
Red River Road near the construction zone was open to local business and neighbourhood traffic Friday afternoon. It is expected to be fully reopened Saturday morning.
