Eighth Street is quiet now … but on Friday it teemed with Xcel crews and emergency personnel seeking to stop and remedy a natural gas blow-out that cut service to 975 Moorhead households. Shown at the scene of the averted disaster at Eighth Street and 16th Avenue South: Mark Nisbet (left) and Janie Hogan (right) of Xcel Energy, and Lt. Gabe Tweten of the sheriff’s department, Clay County’s emergency management director. (Photo/Russ Hanson)

Nancy Edmonds Hanson
hansonnanc@gmail.com

The call came into the Xcel Energy office at a few minutes before midnight Thursday. A city crew removing snowbanks along Eighth Street South had clipped the regulator on the natural gas line just east of Eventide, and gas was blowing out of the line.
“The impact reverberated underground and sent pieces flying underground,” Xcel’s Mark says, explaining how the above-ground bump damaged the gas line and shut-off valve deep beneath the snow-covered boulevard. “We couldn’t get into the manhole to shut it off. The gas was still streaming, with the ground frozen solid six feet down.”
And so began 30 hours of tension – chilly tension – for the natural gas provider, Moorhead’s first responders and 975 households between Main and I-94 from Eighth Street west to the river. From about noon Friday, when technicians determined they’d have to turn off the gas, until about 4:30 Saturday morning, gas furnaces and appliances were sidelined while an army worked to fix the problem. Originally they hoped to avoid interrupting service, but frozen ground and damaged lines, including a shut-off valve, ruled that out. Instead they announced they’d have to cut off service to make repairs.
“When natural gas hits the air, it disperses. There was no real danger of an explosion unless someone had walked into the area with a cigarette or lit a match,” says Mark, Xcel’s principal manager for North Dakota. Instead, the risk lay with their customers’ comfort and safety – particularly the senior citizens at Eventide and other vulnerable households, including group homes and those under hospice care.
For Lt. Gabe Tweten, Clay County’s emergency management director, the accident marked a “first” – his first experience with coordinating emergency responders and keeping city leaders informed since he was named to the post last month. “I didn’t realize the extent of the situation until Friday morning,” he reports. He called the first of three meetings of the community’s emergency team at noon at the Marriott. It brought Xcel representatives together with personnel from the police and fire departments, city government, Concordia College and Eventide, along with F-M Ambulance, the Salvation Army and the Red Cross.
“The goal was to make sure we were all communicating – that everybody had the same story,” the Sheriff’s Department veteran says. The emergency team laid contingency plans: What if Eventide and college dorms had to be evacuated? What if residents needed to take refuge at a warming center? And could Moorhead Public Service handle the surge in electrical demand if hundreds of residents turned on the loaner electric space heaters Xcel rushed to Moorhead all at the same time? (MPS could.)
Communications went out to residents of the affected area – first from Xcel itself with robocalls and then, at about 2:30 p.m., from the city via emails and the Code Red system. After Xcel unloaded 1,300 electric space heaters in Concordia’s Mugaas Center, 400 residents showed up to borrow them. “They were a real game-changer,” Gabe says. “Without them, I don’t know that many people could have stayed in their homes that night.”
Some 100 Xcel workers spread out across the neighborhood in two-man teams, going door to door to turn off natural gas meters, a challenge exacerbated by deep snowdrifts surrounding houses and blocking meters. They included not only local staffers but about 70 crew members arriving from the Twin Cities, St. Cloud, Brainerd, Grand Forks, Minot and Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, the repair site on Eighth Street was a beehive of activity, buzzing into the evening and all through the night. Blocked off from 12th to 24th Avenue South, the thoroughfare was ablaze with countless worklights and emergency flashers: “It looked just like back when we were fighting the floods,” Gabe observes.
At last the lines were repaired, tested and pronounced safe to carry on. The gas was running again by 10 p.m. That launched the last act in the drama. Teams went out again from house to house to relight pilot lights in furnaces and other gas appliances and perform safety checks. One neighborhood resident announced on Facebook at 1:30 a.m.: “We have heat again after 13 and a half hours! The house is beginning to warm up at last. We’ve never been so thrilled to hear a knock on the door in the middle of the night.”
When the sun rose Saturday, all but fewer than 100 customers had had service restored, according to Mark’s assistant Janie Hogan. Those residents were either not home, didn’t answer the door, or had equipment problems that required Xcel crews to call in appliance repair experts. The company announced at 4 p.m. that all affected Moorhead customers had had their service restored.
Gabe comments, “As emergency management goes, this was a good one to have first. Everyone did a great job pulling together.” Many were on standby throughout the incident in case evacuation or warming centers were needed, from FirstLink and F-M Ambulance (with its mobile command center) to MATbus and MSUM, which offered places to put evacuees if that were needed.
Among those earning Gabe’s special thanks was the Salvation Army. “They were there right from the start, circulating between the repair site and the teams working in the neighborhoods to restore service. Until you’ve been there, you just don’t know how good a hot cup of coffee and a sandwich can taste.”
But the real heroes, he suggests, were the people of Moorhead themselves: “Kudos to the population. People were really patient and reasonable and understanding.”
Adds Mark, “Our teams were really overwhelmed by the appreciation they got wherever they knocked on the door.”