Questions remain over who’s responsible for Mt. Lebanon gas leak

An evacuation due to a ruptured gas line that affected more than a dozen homes near Mt. Lebanon’s business district is over, but questions have arisen over who is at fault.

At 3:33 p.m. Tuesday, Mt. Lebanon’s alert system notified residents that the evacuation order was lifted, more than three hours after it went into effect.

“Gas leak is capped; repair underway. Evacuation lifted and it’s safe to go home,” the message stated.

No one was injured, and the evacuations were precautionary.

Golden Triangle Construction, which was doing pipeline replacement work for Pennsylvania American Water Co., broke a 3- to 4-inch Peoples Natural Gas line while working on Cedar Boulevard near Baywood Avenue.

The rupture occurred around noon and affected Cedar between Florida and Mapleton avenues.

Heather DuBose, a water utility spokeswoman, said Golden Triangle notified PAWC that Peoples had not marked the gas line.

“There were multiple unmarked gas service lines, and we did hit one of those lines,” Ms. DuBose said.

PAWC notified the Pennsylvania One Call System of the planned digging as required by the state Public Utility Commission, Ms. DuBose said. She added that it was the gas company’s responsibility at that point to mark gas lines in the area with spray paint, but she said that was not done.

“It’s now the responsibility of the gas company because the line wasn’t marked,” Ms. DuBose said. “We always make the call.”

A Peoples spokeswoman was not able to definitively say who was to blame.

“It’s kind of like a hesaid, she-said, so we would have to investigate it,” Jacqueline Ziemianski said. “We can’t say whether it was their fault or our fault at this time.”

Seventeen addresses were involved in the evacuation, but not all were occupied at the time of the incident.

A total of eight adults and two children were told to leave their homes.

“Our crews are on site. It was a third-party hit,” Ms. Ziemianski said.

“We’re going through, checking the homes, making sure everything is safe,” she said. “Once [utility workers] got on site, they didn’t see any danger for customers. They were just evacuated for precautionary reasons.”