UE REPAIRS GAS LEAK ON BROADWAY

Union Electric linemen and emergency personnel worked for more than an hour to repair a break in a natural gas main in the 1400 block of Broadway Tuesday night.

A jogger passing by Capaha Park first noticed the smell of natural gas and the hiss of the broken pipe, which was three feet underground. He alerted police at about 6 p.m., who in turn called the gas company.

Cape Girardeau police officers and firefighters closed off Broadway from West End Boulevard to Louisiana Avenue, diverting traffic to alternate routes around Capaha Park for nearly two hours.

A.D. Cox, district supervisor for Union Electric, said that a four-inch cast-iron gas main had broken. Firefighters stood by with hoses in case the gas ignited.

"It's more of a safety precaution than anything else," Cox said.

The company did not clamp off the gas line while it was being repaired; instead, two men in protective jump suits wearing oxygen masks crawled into the hole to repair the leak as natural gas rose in clouds around them.

The men cleaned the rust and corrosion off the pipe around the area of the leak, applied a soap and tar emollient, and slipped a steel "sleeve" around the pipe and fastened it off with three bolts.

"It's really easier sometimes to fix the cast iron pipe than it is to fix the plastic piping," Cox said. Union Electric recently replaced some of the iron pipe with plastic, a few hundred feet east of Tuesday's leak.

When a plastic pipe breaks, the gas main must be clamped off and the section replaced, Cox said. Area customers must be notified of the shutdown and advised to relight their pilot lights.

"Gas is most explosive when it is in a mixture of seven parts oxygen and one part gas," said a Union Electric supervisor on the scene. "In conditions like (Tuesday night), there's not much chance of anything happening. When it's overcast and humid, that's another story. The gas can't escape into the atmosphere when the barometric pressure is low."

Workers were not taking any unnecessary chances. When a man approached from the park smoking a cigarette, an officer quickly turned him around and asked that he put the cigarette out.

After the workers were able to crawl into the hole, the pipe was repaired in a matter of minutes. Servicemen from the phone company were summoned when it was discovered that some of the gas had seeped into the phone ducts.

The hole was refilled and emergency vehicles left the scene shortly after 8 p.m.