The DAY the TOWN BLEW UP
This is the story of how such a thing happens – and the heroic response that day.
Thursday, 13 September, 2018
35 Chickering Road, Lawrence, Massachusetts
Around 11 AM
A KNOCK ON THE DOOR wakes up Omayra Figueroa. It’s Leonel. On the front stoop. Of course. Leonel is an honorary Figueroa. His mother often jokes to Omayra about moving his bed there.
Shakira, Omayra’s 21-year-old daughter, throws on some clothes and joins him outside in the sun. It’s beautiful out, the temperature in the low twenties.
The Figueroas – Omayra, her three children: Shakira; Christian, 20; and Sergio, 17 – moved to this working-class neighbourhood of single-family homes in 2013. It sits just around the corner from a strip mall and the Registry of Motor Vehicles, but Colonial Heights feels like its own little world, less than 2.5 square kilometres, green and still. Oak trees arc over hushed streets. In the span of 80 years, Colonial Heights has become increasingly diverse, Latin American and South East Asian names now showing up on mailboxes alongside the Irish and Italian ones.
Thirty-five Chickering Road is the first property that Omayra has ever owned – her castle, she calls it, big and bright, filled with plants she spends time tending to. She got a basketball hoop for her boys, and solar panels on the roof. She loves gathering family and friends for boisterous barbecues in the backyard, with tasty Puerto Rican specialties she cooks herself and lots of music. She has maintained the house’s siding in the preppy two-tone colour scheme found on many suburban homes in Massachusetts, a deep grey trimmed in white. The house makes her feel happy and safe: It has withstood 62 years of New England weather – blizzards, ice storms, floods. It can hold the Figueroas, she figures.
At this time of day, the elm tree next to the front walk casts the entire house into shadow. The pink rose bush beside the brick front stoop waits for the sun. Shakira slides out on to the stoop, and there she sits with Leonel and a friend who’s accompanied him today, talking about things she won’t remember later.
Bare feet up on the stoop, no need to do anything or be anywhere, just blinking yourself awake in the sun, like a cat.
FROM THE GAS METER in Omayra Figueroa’s castle, a steel pipe at least a half inch in diameter descends into the earth and elbows at 90° towards Chickering Road, connecting to the main line that carries natural gas into her home. The gas heats Omayra’s hot water, dries her family’s sheets and towels, warms her radiators on New England winter mornings, and flares blue, orange, and yellow through the burners when she cooks rice and beans for the kids.
From Chickering, the gas main runs in a 60 cm-wide corridor below the roadways on the surface, according to Audrey Schulman, executive director of HEET – the Home Energy Efficiency Team – a nonprofit that has done work mapping gas leaks. A sprawling underground network connects to the intermediate line, then to the high-pressure interstate pipelines that funnel natural gas into Massachusetts, the majority of it from the rich fossil-fuel deposits of Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale. 8 030 kilometres of gas-main lines of the state’s underground pipeline network belongs to a utility company called Columbia Gas of Massachusetts. Itself a subsidiary of the utilities giant NiSource, Columbia Gas runs its gas through some of the nation’s oldest pipelines. These ageing pipes are made of cast iron, a brittle metal with a low pressure tolerance. In the Northeast, earth resettles after freezing and thawing, a phenomenon known as frost heave. This can cause ruptures in old, fragile pipes. Massachusetts, with an average winter temperature of -2.5°C, has the third-most cast-iron pipeline of any state in the nation.
Like other utility companies across the Northeast US, Columbia Gas has been steadily replacing its vulnerable cast-iron gas mains, from 1 340 km in 2005 to 758.6 km in 2017. Its pipeline system entails a patchwork of materials from different eras – cast iron, bare steel, and plastic – each with its own tolerance. For cast iron, it is 0.034 bar, roughly the pressure required to blow up a party balloon. For bare steel, it’s 4 bar or higher, and for plastic, 6.8 bar. At different points in the system, valves regulate gas pressure in accordance with the tolerance of each segment of pipeline.
Columbia Gas repairs more than 1 200 leaks a year. Last April, it reported that 15 per cent of its lines in Massachusetts were ‘leak prone’ owing to issues such as rust, corrosion, and failed welds. Since the deregulation of the gas industry in 1997, state and federal oversight of this infrastructure has been limited. The process is heavily reliant on self-reporting, with utilities performing their own safety inspections, and federal or state inspectors doing spot checks. The Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities currently has only two engineers who are solely responsible for conducting field inspections of the state’s 34 946 km of gas pipes. In addition, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration does not have any legal power to impose a deadline by which the pipeline would have to be replaced.
THE EXPLOSION TURNED THE ROOM SIDEWAYS. SHE YELLS THE NAMES OF HER CHILDREN, AND FINALLY HEARS HER DAUGHTER’S SCREAMS.
In recent years, the Department of Public Utilities has fined Columbia Gas tens of thousands of dollars for a variety of safety violations, The Boston Globe has reported, including: ‘faulty pressure testing and response procedures, insufficiently covering new service lines, improperly classifying leaks, and breaking rules around the use of leak repair kits.’
Even though only two per cent of distribution mains nationwide are made of cast iron, they accounted for 41 per cent of all fatalities involving gas lines between 2005 and 2017. Twenty states in the US have eliminated cast iron from their networks altogether.
South Union and Salem Streets, Lawrence
Approximately 3:45 PM
of Omayra Figueroa’s home, on the Salem Street side of the O’Connell South Common –
