Posted on 04/01/2015 4:46:34 AM PDT by thackney
...destroyed three_buildings and killed two men in the East Village last week resulted from an attempt to hide the unauthorized siphoning of natural gas for tenants in one of the buildings.
Their working theory is that one or more gas lines were surreptitiously tapped over several months; then the siphoning apparatus was dismantled or hidden on Thursday before Consolidated Edison conducted an inspection. As soon as the utility inspectors left, an attempt to resume the diversion of gas went awry, setting off the explosion, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of this working theory.
That version of events is far from proven and is still being pieced together through interviews with utility workers and witnesses, including the owner and the manager of Sushi Park, a restaurant that occupied the ground floor of the building where the explosion took place, 121 Second Avenue, near East Seventh Street. The police interviewed the restaurant owner, Hyeonil Kim, over the weekend and heard his ideas about how gas may have been redirected to the appliances of tenants in the apartments above his restaurant.
Con Edison workers discovered in early August that a gas line for Sushi Park had been tapped to supply fuel to the tenants in that building. That siphoning, which Con Edison inspectors said had created a “hazardous situation,” was intended as a stopgap until the utility approved the use of a bigger line that could serve the whole five-story building, law enforcement sources said.
But the investigators now believe that, possibly for more than a year, gas had been redirected from pipes coming into two of the buildings that were destroyed. They are looking into the possibility that the siphoning apparatus had been dismantled or somehow hidden from Con Edison’s inspectors on Thursday afternoon, then restored after they left.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
From the article:
building at 119 Second Avenue, owned by the same landlord
My point is a good inspector could or should be able to see that.Its part of the job.
You are correct. I don't have support for my meter assumption.
Can’t say, the bldg might have had (must have had!) an adequate supply line before the gen was installed requiring no upgrade. That’s a pretty large genset.
Having done a few installs, I can tell you that a typical home water heater of the older tank style often uses a 1/2” or 3/4” gas feed. A tankless heater generally requires a 1” feed. Sometimes it’s fairly easy, but that can certainly bump the total installed cost. More labor than parts/mat’ls.
There is not enough info shown to blame the inspector. Every portion of the gas line is not going to be visible in multi-story buildings.
Credit union,2 floors, 7 branches and it was the data hub for all.Boss wanted to be sure the data wasn’t interrupted by AC/Heat use.
If it not visible to the inspector its not accessible to a NG thief
When you own the building, you can open up walls and close them again when the plumbing is done.
How much inspection is required by the utility downstream of the meter and service drop?
It really looks like the landlord was involved:
Months Before East Village Blast, Utility Found Gas Line Was Tapped in Dangerous Way
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/nyregion/months-before-east-village-blast-utility-found-gas-line-was-tapped-in-dangerous-way.html
More than seven months before an explosion and fire destroyed three buildings in the East Village...
He said firefighters and Con Edison employees arrived and the utility workers determined that gas intended for the restaurant was being siphoned off — he called it illegal gas-tapping — for use in the newly renovated apartments upstairs in the five-story building.
Mr. Kim, who speaks Korean, said he did not fully understand the utility’s explanation, so he contacted his landlord. He said the landlord hired a plumber to do a “piping job” that satisfied Con Edison’s demands for repair....
One tenant at 121 Second Avenue, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he could not recall any significant disruption in gas service to his apartment since he moved there in midsummer. He shared a text message his roommate received from their landlord, Maria Hrynenko, on Aug. 6, the day Con Edison shut off the gas. It said that the gas would be off for a day because of a cracked main pipe outside the building. After a brief interruption, he said, the apartment had gas right up to Thursday.
Mr. Kim said he had frequently checked to make sure his gas line was not tapped again. He said he had checked within the last month and had never seen any sign of tampering. That is why, he said, he suspected the landlord had chosen instead to draw gas for the apartments from the building next door, at 119 Second Avenue.
That building, like 121 Second Avenue, was owned by a company controlled by Ms. Hrynenko, real estate records show. Ms. Hrynenko’s son, Michael, was injured in Thursday’s explosion after he and a general contractor, Dilber Kukic, went to check out a report of a gas odor at Sushi Park.
The manager of the restaurant called the landlord to report the odor, which is added to natural gas to make it smell like rotten eggs. But neither the manager nor anyone else called 911 or Con Edison to report a possible leak, city officials and Con Edison representatives said.
Instead, Mr. Hrynenko and Mr. Kukic headed to the basement of 121 Second Avenue to investigate. As soon as they arrived, city officials said, the explosion rocked the neighborhood....
I design gas systems and pipe size absolutely DOES matter.
And yes, installing gas in NYC is extremely expensive. Somewhere on the order of $10k + $1k per foot for typical installs. The gas company does offer many incentives though.
Well, technically the gas would all be metered and paid for if that’s true.
The more serious issue in these cases is the non-compliant installations which, as we see here, can blow up.
The landlord was not stealing gas. They were illegally supplying gas from one building they owned to another. This allowed them to rent apartments a year ago before Con Ed installed the larger pipeline to the building which they were currently doing. Gas cost to the building is negligible, when each new apartment rents for $4000- a month.
They don’t normally inspect concealed piping unless there is a permit for that specific job or there is an incident.
Without surveillance of everyone, there really is no way to enforce this. There’s nothing to stop someone stupid from tapping a line and replacing the wall/ceiling. There are millions of gas customers in this city and sh** will happen!
Do we know if the meter reading was billed to the resturant, since the article says the "gas intended for the restaurant"?
Might not have been stealing gas, but was lying to folks when he told the tenants the initial outage due to cracked main, and told the resturant he hired plumbers to do a “piping job” that satisfied Con Edison’s demands for repair.
Gas cost to the building is negligible, when each new apartment rents for $4000- a month.
Maybe he couldn't see it because of the 100 dollar bills in front of his eyes.
I’ve read that two people died in the explosion, but at least one of those people was just someone who was having lunch at the restaurant in the building (and thus likely had nothing to do with the gas siphoning).
And there are likely plenty of other “someones” in question beyond the people who were “blowed up.” I’d be taking a good hard look at the building owner, superintendant, property manager, architect, contractors, etc...
***Their working theory is that one or more gas lines were surreptitiously tapped over several months***
One man back in the 1920s Oklahoma tapped into a gas line to heat his house. He thought it was a low pressure gas line SURPRISE, SURPRISE! It was HIGH pressure, blew up and caused a big fire in the oil fields. Killed the tapper.
I was a bus boy and a customer who was paying his bill who died. The restaurant owner apparently didn’t know much about what the landlord was up to.
The 1937 New London School in Texas explosion, due leaking gas line tap, was the reason for creating the Texas Profession Engineering State Registration. Of the 500 students and forty teachers in the building, approximately 298 died.
https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/yqn01
https://engineers.texas.gov/lic.htm
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