It's been a cold night for some residents in Pearl whose homes are without natural gas. Utility crews from Center Point Gas have been repairing a gas line that was accidentally cut by subcontractors. The pipe was about four inches in diameter.
A police spokesman says it happened around 1:00 pm on Friday along Airport Road near Highway 80 in Pearl. Phone and internet lines were also damaged. AT&T workers say they hope to have lines restored by Saturday afternoon.
The pipe started leaking and caught fire when crews from Three Rivers Contracting cut it while laying fiber optic cables in the ground. No one was hurt, but police evacuated nearby businesses and shutdown a portion of Airport Road.
"It was bursting into flames and explosions started coming from it, and it was pretty hot," said Aubrey Shute, who works in the area. She and her co-worker, Charles Orr, Jr., shot amateur video of the flames using a digital camera.
"At first we thought it was a car that exploded and saw all these little explosions come off it," said Orr.
It wasn't a car, but an expensive piece of machinery used by the contractors, worth as much as $250,000. Workers stopped the fire by using a method called crimping - crews dig deep into the ground and pinch the pipe in order to stop the gas flow.
"We didn't know if it could affect other gas lines in the area, or it could head to a gas line on our block," said Orr. The fire did cause headaches for Dream, Inc., where Shute and Orr work. It knocked out their telephone and internet connections. Despite the inconvenience, they're happy no one was hurt.
There was a gas line break in Pearl in October, but that one didn't catch fire. A stretch of Highway 80 was shut down in front of Hinds Community College for about two hours. No one was hurt, and the break didn't affect classes at the campus.
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