Posted on 03/29/2015 7:09:19 AM PDT by grundle
NEW YORK (AP) — More than seven months before an explosion and fire leveled three apartment buildings in Manhattan's East Village, utility workers discovered that the gas line to a restaurant in one of them had been illegally tapped, creating a hazardous situation, according to the company.
On Aug. 6, a meter reader at the restaurant detected the smell of gas and reported it, said Consolidated Edison spokesman Allan Drury. A gas crew dispatched to the site found multiple leaks in a gas line that had been tapped, Drury said, adding that the restaurant was the only customer in the building authorized to receive gas.
The discovery led Con Edison to shut down gas service to the building for about 10 days while the building owner made repairs. Gas service was restored after the utility deemed it safe, Drury said.
City officials suspect that leaking natural gas was the source of Thursday's explosion and fire, which sparked a raging blaze that took hundreds of firefighters to quell. De Blasio visited a firehouse Saturday to thank some of them.
Meanwhile, emergency workers painstakingly looked for signs of two missing people, scooping through piles of loose brick, wood and debris with their hands and using dogs to search the rubble. Authorities acknowledged the chances of finding either person alive were slim.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
My first thought about this was not terror, but criminals who are aliens, given the type of building and NYC demographics now.
What NYC demographics? Do you even know where NYC is? From your post I guess you live in a trailervl park and use a septic technology known as a “hole in the ground.”
I talked to an old gas fitter one time that said in the old days they would weld a flange on an active gas main then puncture it and quickly thread a pipe on it to add a new line.....not me.
The least expensive 1-bedroom apartment in Manhattan is about $3000 a month. Nobody who is poor lives here. All fingers point to the landlord hiring off-the-books contractors to renovate his buildings.
I remember reading of some guy down in Oklahoma back around 1920, who tapped a gas line. Unfortunately for him, it was a HIGH-Pressure line and blew up causing a big fire in the oil fields.
Maybe; I would suspect modifying the building to rent out rooms for a lot less than $3,000.
There was a fire a few years back in one of the north Jersey towns overlooking Manhattan (Englewood Cliffs, maybe), and the fatalities included people from various countries living in basement “rooms” (as opposed to a basement apartment) that had been illegally added. Heat and electricity are often added, without permits, inspection, etc.
That doesn’t make any sense. If you can get a fat price from rich tenants, why bother penny-ante room rentals? That’s the sort of thing they do in the Bronx, $800 a month for a 4 x 8 room. Here in Manhattan, they put in 6 renovated 1-bedrooms, rent them for $4000 a month, and then sell the building for $15 million. That’s real money!
The last name of the “contractor” was Albanian or Serbian - he is also a slumlord who owns a few decaying, fire-trap buildings in Upper Manhattan. He’s an immigrant, but probably perfectly legal, since we brought at lot of them here.
Many of them started off as building supers in slum buildings in NYC and parlayed that into “construction” and property ownership. You have to give them credit for that, but they are terrible contractors, think you do everything by paying off the inspectors, have no skills and don’t want any, thank you, and are corrupt in every possible way. And they are worse landlords.
Working with gas is simple, this is bizarre.
Wow. Why not just call me redneck or racist?
NYC is reaching the level of Nigeria. Poorly made Gas Line connections have killed far to many already for folks to not understand the risk.
in the neighborhood.You seem unfamiliar with "RENT CONTROL"
To dodge zoning laws; two family homes become two families plus four rented rooms (and taxes don’t go up). In my area they have periodic appraisals which include having someone go through every room of your home to find them.
NYC is all bad demographics. if there were lots of fires it might not be such a drag on America
Oh, and the rental income is undeclared as well.
In order to be subject to rent control, you have to have been in continuous occupancy of your apartment since 1967. These buildings are ‘new renovations’, and rent at the market rate as of right.
Quick code question: Can an LPG flex-line (metal) typically go through a crawl space and then up? Thanks, just planning this; not doing it myself.
Are you one of those "sensitive caring" NY'ers who live in the center of all that wonderful blessed $hit? You must have helped write the book "How to win friends and influence people."
I'll bet you wrote chapter one..
"If You Want to Gather Honey, Don't Kick Over the Beehive"
I assume you mean the appliance flex, you can google questions like that, but no.
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