Witness Regrets Not Reporting Smell of Deadly Gas Leak
from wbay.com
By Sarah Thomsen
The Door County district attorney says he will not file charges against anyone involved in last July’s propane gas explosion in Ellison Bay that killed two people at the Cedar Grove Resort. A report released Monday by the sheriff’s department details the findings of the investigation, and the D.A. says nothing rises to the level of criminal negligence.
We now know Ferrell Gas installed the propane lines under the resort in the summer of 1999, and no Wisconsin law required the company to document their location.
We also know that on June 26, 2006, Arby’s Construction emailed Diggers Hotline to check for buried utilities before doing electrical work on the resort property. Two phone lines were marked but the buried propane lines weren’t.
And we know on July 7, 2006, Arby’s construction crew unknowingly damaged one of the propane lines, which started leaking into the ground. Three days later, a series of explosions rocked Ellison Bay.
Among the hundreds of pages in the report is an interview with Scott Wesa. He was fishing in the bay two days before the explosion and smelled a strong odor coming from the Cedar Grove Resort area but didn’t realize what it was.
“We were coming into the harbor in the morning, 10 or 11 A.M., and it stunk, it stunk really bad. It smelled like rotten eggs. I thought, well, they’re having all the E. coli problems up there, it’s just some sewage or something that blew in because the wind was blowing in.”
The smell drifting on to the bay was so strong it made Wesa’s eyes water and he became nauseous.
“Then we saw that the contractor was digging right there. We pulled in and saw him scraping away at the dirt or whatnot, and they must have hit the pipe right then.”
Wesa told his brother about it later that day but both disregarded the smell as sewage, having no idea what would happen days later.
“We never thought anything about it, and then we came back that night and the town blew up. Then I felt really bad, because I’m a fireman. I should have known better. I know the smell of gas, so it’s not a good thing,” Wesa said.
Wesa regrets not reporting the smell to authorities but says at the same time he assumed crews would’ve known there were propane lines where they were digging.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner. I’m sorry it didn’t come to mind. I mean, what are you going to do? I thought it was just sewage. I mean, like I said, they had been having so many problems with that up there, and it just came to mind that that was the source of the smell.”
Investigators still don’t know what sparked the propane explosion and say they may never know.