DISASTERS: The Gas Is Leaking

DISASTERS “The Gas Is Leaking” About 1:30 one afternoon last week, the phone rang in William J. Maas’s office in downtown Rochester. His eight-year-old daughter, Mary Anne, was calling from their home out in suburban Brighton.

Her mother was out; a housekeeper was in charge of Mary Anne and her four-year-old brother. “The gas is leaking,” Mary Anne sobbed. “It won’t stop.” Then she hung up.

Across the street, Mrs. Millare C. Upson was putting her vacuum cleaner away when she heard a “boom” and looked out the front door. “The Maas home just seemed to settle right into its basement. Then there were the awful flames and the smoke.” Two men working nearby dragged the housekeeper out into the yard, her clothes on fire. More explosions rocked the area. A house down the street blew up, then another, and another. People scrambled into the street dodging flying timber and glass. The blasts spread, rolled on like giant popcorn, too fast to count. A boy staggered out of a house, his arm in shreds; an old man quietly went on mowing his lawn near two shattered houses as the first fire engines roared past.

Eight hours later, 35 fire companies and 475 firemen got the blasts and fires under control. For five blocks around, suburban Brighton was a shambles. Forty-four houses were demolished or badly damaged, 24 people injured, and three, including Mary Anne Maas and her young brother, were killed.

The gas company said that workmen laying a new sidewalk had gone home, leaving flares to mark the area. A nearby manhole had evidently become filled with gas from a leaking pipe. The flares ignited the gas and blew the manhole cover up into the air. In falling back it struck a pressure-regulating mechanism, forcing the regulator arm into the “open” position. This, said the gas company, introduced excessive gas pressure into customers’ homes, where the gas was ignited by various means, such as pilot lights on stoves.