Fairfax County firefighters and others are still trying to locate the source of the gas leak that caused a home explosion in Centreville, Virginia, on Sunday.
As of Tuesday, there were 46 Centreville homes still under an evacuation order from the fire department and 82 overall that did not have their gas turned on, Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Assistant Chief of Operations Eric Craven said at a press conference.
The area is served by six gas lines from both Washington Gas and the Williams Pipeline Corp. Investigators are ruling lines out piece by piece to try and find which one is leaking. Currently, Washington Gas is doing digging work to try and find the leak.
“It’s a process of elimination going through the lines, which are layered crisscross, so you can’t have multiple utilities digging in the same area at the same time,” Chief Craven said.
The lines in the affected area are as small as 2 inches in diameter and as large as 42 inches in diameter. Mr. Craven said that if the leak is from “one of the smaller lines, 2 inches or 6 inches smaller lines, we’re comfortable with maintaining the safety with the evacuation distance that we have.”
Conversely, if the leak is coming from a larger line, Chief Craven said, the evacuation order would expand to everywhere within a 0.25-mile radius of where the gas leak is believed to be occurring. The expansion would affect 100 additional homes.
The explosion happened Sunday in the 14300 block of Quail Pond Court in Centreville at around 9:48 p.m. The elderly man inside the house that exploded and his neighbor both sustained non-life-threatening injuries. They were treated at a local hospital and have since been released, according to WJLA-TV.
“I thought it was a bomb. It was that loud. It shook everything. Two houses down, you could feel the heat from it,” nearby resident Cami Minks told FFXNow.
Fairfax County officials said in a blog post Tuesday that the county would be escorting evacuated residents to their homes to retrieve essential items and their vehicles until 9 p.m. The evacuation period is expected to last another 24 to 72 hours.
Washington Gas is paying for people to stay in hotels, either by securing accommodations or reimbursing evacuees who already booked themselves into a hotel, Fairfax County officials said.
Anyone who saw the blast or who might have surveillance footage is asked to contact the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation, at witness@ntsb.gov.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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