Saturday, April 4, 2015

EAST VILLAGE, NY GAS EXPLOSION REVEALS PROBLEMS IN CITY’S INSPECTION SYSTEM









 


APRIL 3, 2015

NEW YORK, NY

In the nearly eight months after utility workers found evidence of a leaking unauthorized tap on a gas line in an East Village building, the city never sent an inspector to make sure the dangerous activity had not recurred.

The reason, city officials say, was simple: They were never aware of any potential hazard.

Now, the building is gone — the site of a fiery explosion on March 26 that destroyed much of the block and left two men dead. The police and criminal prosecutors believe the blast may have been caused by the continued tapping of a gas line there.

But even without a definitive conclusion, the way in which an inappropriate and dangerous gas situation at 121 Second Avenue was handled has exposed what many consider to be a gap in the flow of information between the utility companies and the New York City Department of Buildings. The only notification about the leak discovered in August came a month later in a routine filing from Consolidated Edison, which was all the utility was required to share with the city.

Now, in a tacit acknowledgment of the shortcomings in the current procedures, city officials are moving to sharpen their inspection efforts and improve communication with Con Edison.
“The reports are very mechanical,” Anthony E. Shorris, the city’s first deputy mayor, said of the notifications from the utility. “There has to be ways to make that faster, more automated and more useful for us in terms of targeting where we might send out additional inspection units.”
Mr. Shorris said the city hoped to conduct inspections “in a more focused way,” with plans to single out “people who have a history of problematic behavior” based on violation records and other factors.
“We’ll work with the city on any new processes they are considering,” said Michael Clendenin, a spokesman for Con Ed. “The safety of all residents is our primary concern.”
The current system involves random inspections and relies heavily on Con Edison and other utilities to assume responsibility for stopping potentially hazardous situations. The changes Mr. Shorris proposed could lead to closer scrutiny of buildings like 121 Second Avenue and their owners, though it is not clear that such changes would have prevented the recent explosion.
By all accounts from officials of the city and Con Edison, what happened there on Aug. 6 followed all of the existing rules and regulations.
A Con Edison worker smelled natural gas in the basement while reading the meter and called for help. Firefighters and utility inspectors arrived and found that a flexible hose had been attached to the gas line that served a restaurant on the ground floor, Sushi Park, and it was leaking.
Deeming this a “hazardous situation,” the Con Edison workers shut off the valve that allowed gas to flow into the building and demanded the removal of the tap, which appeared to be diverting gas to apartments upstairs. As is customary in the utility industry, the company’s inspectors hung a red cardboard tag on the line to indicate it had been shut off.
A copy of the tag, which contained information about when and why the service was disrupted, was given to the manager of the restaurant, which was Con Edison’s only customer in that building. The tag would remain on the main valve until Con Edison approved the work a private plumber had done to fix the leak.
Con Edison restored the service on Aug. 15, nine days after it was shut off. A few weeks later, the company included the building in an extensive list of locations where gas was shut down, according to city officials. That citation said only that a leak had been found; it did not mention the unauthorized tapping
Mr. Shorris said that “if Con Ed finds anything that’s illegal or inappropriate, of course they tell us,” but acknowledged the “long lag time” on reports from the utility. He added that the reports often include scant detail about the circumstances of a shutdown.
Mr. Shorris did note, though, that the restoration of gas service cannot be done without a licensed master plumber self-certifying the work, a Con Ed engineer inspecting the site and another utility worker checking the meter.
The city currently conducts random inspections of self-certified jobs, he said. Other inspections often take place in response to complaints from residents or other agencies.
According to Buildings Department records, the city issued 112 violations last year for the supplying of gas to buildings without inspections, but officials say there are undoubtedly more instances of gas being inappropriately used that are not detected.
The department has been a punching bag of sorts for the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has sought to reduce bureaucratic malaise and speed up inspections.
During his State of the City address in February, Mr. de Blasio recalled his days on the City Council, where members are inundated with complaints about the department.
Some changes had already been in the works before the explosion. The de Blasio administration said it was investing $17.4 million over two years, with plans to hire new inspectors and engineers. A position of “risk management officer” was also created.
Since last year, a trade group of plumbers has also pressed the administration to enhance its enforcement efforts.
“The industry is under the serious impression that D.O.B. does a very poor job investigating and disciplining unscrupulous licensed plumbers as well as enforcement actions against unlicensed individuals/firms performing plumbing work,” according to a December letter from the group, the Plumbing Foundation City of New York. On March 25, the night before the explosion on Second Avenue, the city’s buildings commissioner, Rick D. Chandler, met with the plumbing group at a restaurant in Queens to address its concerns.
Mr. Chandler agreed that the department could improve its enforcement of unlicensed work, said Steward D. O’Brien, the group’s executive director.
“He said: ‘Listen, you guys are right. We need to do more,’ ” Mr. O’Brien recalled.
In other places, government agencies and utility companies treat reports of emergency gas shut-offs with more urgency.
Unitil, a distributor of gas and electricity based in New Hampshire, sends special notices to local gas inspectors and state regulators whenever it shuts off gas service out of a concern for safety, said Carol Valianti, a spokeswoman for the company.
Each time Unitil workers place a red tag on a customer’s pipe, the company sends a form explaining why the gas was shut off by registered mail to the customer and to the local inspector, Ms. Valianti said. The company is required to report shut-offs to New Hampshire’s Public Utilities Commission, she said, adding that it fulfills that obligation through emails that are generated automatically.
In New Hampshire, Ms. Valianti said, the company cannot restore the service until the local gas inspector has approved the repairs.
While it may not be feasible to have as many layers of inspection in New York City, some experts said that distinguishing serious hazards from less-dangerous situations could help.
Mark McDonald, a former gas-utility worker who investigates gas explosions, said he routinely drew attention to situations like the one Con Edison stumbled upon. Whenever he found evidence of an attempt to tap a gas line or steal gas from his employer — “something that’s considered a hazard that we’ve interrupted” — he would go beyond the requirement to fill out a red tag, he said.
“If they did it once, they may do it again,” said Mr. McDonald, the president of NatGas Consulting in Massachusetts. “I would pick up the phone in that situation and call the city inspector, just for the safety of the people who don’t know what’s going on. It’s common sense.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com