Subcontractor had no idea gas line stub was there

Company working on $2.1B project looks into the root cause of downtown gas leak

The Rideau Transit Group, the city’s contractor on the $2.1-billion LRT project, says it’s trying to understand why a subcontractor didn’t know there was a stub for a natural gas line in the exact spot where crews were digging Tuesday.

“They didn’t know the stub was there. They knew the line was there,” technical director Peter Lauch said Thursday, adding that sometimes utility information doesn’t go to that level of detail.

“One of the things we’re investigating is how and why they weren’t aware of it,” he said.

There were labourers and an excavator at the Queen Street construction site when the natural gas leak happened.

Lauch said there are procedures for when work gets close to a gas line, but RTG is still looking into the root cause of the break.

The subcontractor work on the Queen Street renewal is related to the LRT project, since the city wants to have a nice road and sidewalks where there are station entrances. The LRT tunnel runs deep under Queen Street.

Firefighters and police evacuated buildings in a four-block radius of the construction site when the natural gas line broke.

It took almost three hours for the gas to be turned off.

Enbridge Gas said there were 34 customers affected by the outage.

The gas line was repaired by about 11 p.m. Tuesday and all natural gas service was restored by 3:45 p.m. Wednesday.

The Ontario Ministry of Labour was still investigating Thursday, but inspectors had released the site back to RTG and road work resumed.

The province’s Technical Standards and Safety Authority was also looking into the gas leak.

It wasn’t the first time a natural gas line was struck during LRT-related construction.

Lauch said there was a smaller cut of a gas line about three years ago at the west tunnel portal.

Another cut happened during work on Highway 417, he said.

The city continues to assess the financial impacts of the gas leak, but the fire department said it won’t take a budgetary hit.

“Ottawa Fire Services did not incur additional costs as on duty personnel and apparatus were utilized during (Tuesday’s) gas leak,” fire chief Gerry Pingitore said in an email.

“The deployment of vehicles and firefighters is not considered an additional cost as they are always available as per the city’s 24/7 fire operations.”

Lauch complimented emergency services tasked with managing the evacuation zone.

“It was an orderly vacating of the buildings, which speaks well to how organized everybody was,” Lauch said.