BARRE, Vt. -
In Barre City, Vermont Wednesday crews patched up a gas leak at the North End Deli Mart Westco gas station. But not before a lot was lost.
"Worst case scenario we could be missing up to 3,000 gallons," station owner Dave Simendinger said.
Simendinger says a mechanical piece at a pump blew out and started the leak. Some people in Barre say they started smelling gas in their homes three weeks ago.
Freesia Roy lives close to the leak and was one of the people the Barre Fire Department warned that gas had absorbed into the soil and sewer system but not in the drinking water and storm sewer.
"I don't think it's great but as long as they fix it so Emma doesn't get harmed by it," Roy said looking down at her young daughter, who was in a stroller for a walk.
Throughout Wednesday the fire department worked to see just how far the contamination had spread. They were going man hole to man hole checking for any potentially explosive gasses that were in the sewer system.
Downtown businesses were even told they might have to evacuate the area.
"It made us a little nervous," Kendall Pepin said.
"I was on my lunch break actually going down the Barre-Montpelier road and they were checking all the sewers seeing if the leak was in there."
No explosive levels of gas were found.
Vermont Health Department expert Dr. Bill Irvin says the leak still poses a potential health threat to the Barre community.
"Gasoline does contain a number of products that are harmful if people are exposed to them for a long duration," Dr. Irwin said.
Symptoms of gas exposure could include feeling light headed, dizzy or nauseous. But Dr. Irwin hopes the small levels of gas measured won't be enough make people sick.
"With the measures that have been taken so far we determined that the concentrations are low," Dr. Irwin said.
But Simendinger did acknowledge it was a lot of gas lost. So we asked him how so much gas could be leaked without being notified earlier.
"How is there not a fail switch if 3000 gallons of fuel were potentially lost? It seems like a lot to have let go of and not known about it until today," We asked Simendinger.
"Well it happened recently. These pipes are under pressure in this case the gasoline pump is not secondary contained," Simendinger said.
"Under pressure it would appear to look like it was working fine. The pump, like I said, under pressure appeared like it worked fine.
"It was super unleaded so it was sort of intermittent. Super unleaded is not the number one product that we sell so it's more random, fewer customers than the regular.
"We do depend on our people who work in the stores to report anything that they see, smell, hear whatever from the customers and nobody had reported anything to us."
The Agency of Natural Resources and other state departments as well Barre officials will continue to investigate the gas leak.
There has yet to be an estimate on how expensive it will be to clean the leak.
