Firefighters on scene ushered residents across the street. Credit: Sara Tabin
A busted gas pipe on Burlington’s Maple Street inadvertently caused a fire alarm and evacuation at Wharf Lane apartments on Thursday.

Burlington Fire Department Deputy Chief Robert Plante said a construction crew working on the street struck a natural gas main outside the apartment building, allowing pressurized gas to escape. The fire department received a call at 11:34 a.m. and quickly responded to the scene.

The smell of gas lingered over neighboring blocks.

Firefighters used hoses to dissipate the gas vapor, but the surge in water tripped the Wharf Lane apartment fire alarm and caused the sprinkler system to activate. Residents were subsequently evacuated but allowed to return around noon when firefighters declared the scene safe.

Resident Barb Morton spoke with Seven Days after alerting a firefighter to an elderly woman living on the third floor of her building. She said she heard a “kaboom” and then hissing outside her window and looked out to see the construction crew “scattering.”

Lori Francis, another resident, said she was in her apartment when the fire alarm went off. The next thing she knew, the fire department was in her building instructing her to evacuate.

Despite the commotion, Maple Street is safe for pedestrians. Credit: Sara Tabin
By 11:55 a.m., Plante declared the area safe. The department was keeping an eye on nearby buildings as Vermont Gas evaluated the situation, he said.

It’s unclear how the construction crew, which has been working on the roadway for weeks, struck the pipeline. Plante said he had only spoken with the construction company to make sure they had shut down their equipment during the investigation.

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Sara Tabin was a news intern at Seven Days during the summer of 2018. She was born in Burlington but later moved to Utah, where she interned at the Park Record in Park City. She is currently a senior at Yale University and a City Editor at the Yale Daily...

3 replies on “Burlington Gas Leak Forces Residents to Evacuate Apartment”

  2. @NorthOldEnder – Oh Yes, proof of the Mayor’s “War on Poor People” because the pipe break occurred at a subsidized housing project! How dare the City put subsidized housing projects where gas pipes could break!

  3. Digging holes in the ground in the vicinity of buried natural gas pipelines tends to be tricky business. Unfortunate shit inevitably seems to happen somewhere, and even an experienced urban construction crew, like that on Maple Street, can accidentally strike a buried gas pipe and set off an explosion.

    According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety, the leading cause of natural gas pipeline accidents is damage by digging near existing pipeline, with excavation accounted for almost 60 percent of reported natural gas distribution pipeline incidents over a 10-year period.

    That is why the inane retroactive claim by Vermont Gas – that the locations where they cheated, and illegally buried the Addison County Natural Gas pipeline at shallower depths (three feet) than their Certificate of Public Good requires (four feet or deeper) are just as safe – is an utter crock of shit.

    Beth Parent and her multinational Gaz Metro overlords simply have no clue whatsoever if some amateur weekend Bobcat warrior, unwittingly messin around in the vicinity of their buried natural gas pipeline, will turn out to be a committed, four-foot-plus-deep-hole-in-the-ground kind of guy, or will fatally prove to possess a shallower constituency, and a predilection for three-footers.

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