A gas line break on Depot Road forced the evacuation of several nearby homes on Tuesday (June 21) at around noon, and some are questioning the way RCMP handled the situation.
People were allowed to return to their homes a short time later after the situation was resolved.
According to Chris Murphy, a Fortis gas customer service technician, a Bobcat driver was grading an area to prepare for the installation of a driveway and "they took off the top and hit the three-quarter-inch gas service leading to the house."
He explained that the gas leak was a dangerous hazard because it could catch fire.
"We have a problem with static electricity on a warm day, and static electricity if it's blowing gas will catch fire," said Murphy. "The gas burns at 3,100 degrees [C] so it can be a problem."
Bystanders gathered at the scene despite the stench and the loud hissing noise, anxious to see what was happening.
"I was driving home from work about noon and I smelt it," said Andy Gruber, who lives less than a block away from where the incident took place near the northeast corner of Depot and Government roads.
"I was coming down Depot Road and all of a sudden I could just smell the gas because it was so strong and I obviously thought it was a little weird. Then this guy was telling me to go way around the house and I saw this Bobcat half dug in the hole."
Gruber immediately assumed it must be a gas leak and told his girlfriend and brother, who were at the house, to get ready to evacuate if necessary.
"Basically we're waiting around and a cop pulls up. He's setting up a roadblock across Depot and I go up to him and say, 'Do I need to evacuate or anything?'" asked Gruber.
"The cop was like, 'I don't know if you need to evacuate' and something was said over the radio and then he looked at me and said, 'Yeah you should get your family out.'"
Gruber and his family packed up and left, but Gruber felt there should have been more communication.
"It was handled OK but it could have been better there needed to be a lot more communication because the police had no idea what the hell was going on," he said.
"I think I knew more about it than he did. All they were doing was trying to keep people away from Depot Road but I watched four cops pass by my house before anyone even stopped to set up a roadblock, which was a little odd. And there were people hanging around on the corner of Government Road and here I was evacuating."
Darren Eyben, who lives two houses down, said the RCMP didn't evacuate people fast enough.
"There was definitely some congestion around here for a while. Most people got evacuated but definitely something that should have been evacuated a little bit more fully," he said.
"I didn't get the impression the RCMP was trained in this situation."
Eyben said he was actually planning to file a compliant with the RCMP about how police handled the situation.
RCMP Cpl. Dave Duplissie said he thought the situation was handled well and quickly.
"There were several of us at the scene. A backhoe operator doing a bit of landscaping hit the gas line going into the house and we evacuated five or six houses on either side of it," said Duplissie. "We called in Fortis Gas and the fire department. He capped it off and that's all."
He said there's no structured protocol to deal with gas leaks and that as long as the gas is not venting into the lower floor of a house, it's not extremely dangerous.
"It wasn't venting into a house so it's just good to evacuate the people to be on the safe side in case it settles down into a house," he said. "It's when it settles into low ground in a house then you can have explosions."
He said it took less than 15 minutes to resolve the situation and that the evacuations were more precautionary than necessary.
