SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The National Transportation Safety Board will investigate a natural gas explosion on a San Francisco street that sent flames into the sky for hours and damaged five buildings, an official said Thursday.
NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said an eight-person team will travel to San Francisco. The agency often investigates blasts on pipelines because they transport oil and natural gas, which it oversees. California regulators also are investigating.
City fire officials said a crew digging on a street to install fiber-optic wires cut a natural gas line, igniting the fire Wednesday, San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White said. No one was injured.
“We just felt the shaking, and the next thing we knew, people were banging on the door to tell people it’s time to start evacuating,” said resident Nick Jalali, 28, who was cooking at home when the electricity cut out.
Flames shot above the rooftops of three-story buildings and burned for more than two hours until utility workers were able to shut off the gas fueling the fire.
Five buildings were damaged, including one housing Hong Kong Lounge II, a reservations-only dim sum restaurant that is a fixture on the city’s “best of” lists. The fire began on the street in front of the restaurant.
Officials evacuated several nearby buildings, including a medical clinic and apartments, Hayes-White said. Vehicles on one of the city’s main arteries were rerouted as authorities cordoned off the bustling neighborhood.
Caroline Gasparini, 24, who lives kitty-corner from where the fire ignited, said she and her housemate were in their living room when the windows started rattling. She looked up to see flames reflected in the glass.
“We went into crisis mode,” Gasparini said. “We grabbed our shoes, grabbed our laptops and grabbed our passports and just left.”
Gasparini said they saw employees of the burning restaurant run out the back door and people fleeing down the block.
Firefighters worked to keep the fire from spreading while Pacific Gas & Electric crews tried to shut off the natural gas line. The company stressed that the workers who cut the gas line are not affiliated with the utility.
PG&E spokeswoman Melissa Subbotin said state excavation rules required crews to dig by hand around other pipelines before they were eventually able to “squeeze” a 4-inch (10-centimeter) plastic line.
She said that because the fire was contained to a limited area, the utility had to weigh the threat from the fire with the risk of more drastic action.
“Had we turned the gas off to a transmission system, we would have shut off gas to nearly the entire city of San Francisco,” she said. “The objective of this was to turn the gas off safely and as quickly as possible.”
Subbotin said PG&E would shut off a transmission line in an earthquake.
PG&E is under heightened scrutiny over its natural gas pipelines after one exploded under a neighborhood south of San Francisco in 2010, killing eight people and wiping out a neighborhood in suburban San Bruno.
A U.S. judge PG&E $3 million for a conviction on six felony charges of failing to properly maintain the pipeline, and the utility remains under a federal judge’s watch in that case.
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Associated Press writers Paul Elias, Olga R. Rodriguez and Juliet Williams in San Francisco contributed to this report.
