Federal Regulators Say Con Ed and City Are at Fault for 2014 East Harlem Explosion

June 11, 2015 — It was a scene from our very nightmares: on March 12, 2014, an explosion and ensuing fire in East Harlem toppled two five-story buildings, killing eight people, and displacing more than 100 families and several small businesses. The blast was so powerful, it hurled pieces of building onto the elevated Metro North tracks. More than a year later, regulators at the National Transportation Safety Board have determined that the explosion "would not have happened if two of Consolidated Edison's gas pipes had been welded together properly," reports The New York Times. The safety board added that "the faulty connection between those pipes might not have ended so disastrously had New York City repaired a gaping hole in a nearby sewer main that it had known about for at least eight years." Other factors that contributed to the accident, according to the article, "were the failure of neighborhood residents to report the gas odor they noticed and the failure of Con Edison to notify the [New York City] Fire Department as soon as somebody alerted the company." Granted, nobody called Con Edison until after 9 a.m. on the day of the explosion to report a possible gas leak, and when they did, the person's tone was reportedly very uncertain. But even after starting to alert the fire department, per protocol, a Con Edison representative got "distracted," reportedly saying, "Hold up. No, sorry. Hold on. Hold on. I'll call you right back." And then never did. The explosion occurred 11 minutes after that call. According to the article, the safety board concluded that "the task of the emergency medical workers was complicated further by Con Edison's failure to install valves that would have made it easier to shut off the gas that fed the fire." What does Con Ed say? That it's suing the city, for starters, and that it disagrees that it is to blame: "Con Edison disputed the investigators' finding that the primary source of the natural gas that fueled the explosion was the ruptured connection between its main pipe and a smaller one that branched off to an apartment building. Company officials acknowledged that the weld was flawed but insisted that the gas had seeped through a different crack that the investigators found." Surprise, surprise.