The Day a Missing Line Turned a Neighborhood into an Inferno

The Day a Missing Line Turned a Neighborhood into an Inferno

Fear and disbelief: a routine pipe upgrade sent 150 times the normal gas pressure into a residential network, turning everyday furnaces into simultaneous explosives - and one missing line on a maintenance document set it all in motion. How did a single absent sentence lead to 80 fires, 30,000 evacuees, and an 18-year-old's death?

In this episode, we tell the chronological story of what happened on September 13, 2018: the chimney that crushed a car, the regulator that opened to full output, and the cascade of failures that followed. Listen to learn how a standard infrastructure upgrade became an unprecedented disaster and what question investigators spent a year trying to answer.

Person: Leonel Rondon Date: September 13, 2018 Location: Lawrence, Andover, North Andover, Massachusetts Event: Gas overpressure disaster causing 80 fires Status: 1 fatality, 25 injured, 30,000 evacuated

- At 4:15 PM a chimney landed on and crushed the roof of Leonel Rondon’s car. - The gas network pressure reached 75 psi, 150 times the normal 0.5 psi. - Eighty fires burned across three communities simultaneously. - Eighteen structures were burning at the peak of the disaster. - Twenty-five people were injured and 30,000 people were forced from their homes.

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