Possible gas leak disrupts downtown
By John Joyce
Published in News on December 2, 2015 1:46 PM
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Chief Gary Whaley, Capt. Vaden Lee and Assistant Chief Frank Sasser discuss plans to send a group of firefighters into the tunnels below the Will R. Sullivan Building Tuesday morning after a possible gas leak was called in.
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News-Argus/CASEY MOZINGO
Firefighters with the Goldsboro Fire Department prepare to search for the source of a gas leak under the Will R. Sullivan Building.
The smell of gasoline coming from a stairwell in a downtown building forced the Goldsboro Fire Department to cordon off an entire city block and evacuate a building for three hours Tuesday.
No injuries were reported and the source of the gas leak was never found. The incident did, however, threaten to force an evacuation of the Wayne County Jail and sent firefighters underground into abandoned Cold War-era fallout shelters buried beneath the city.
Jail Administrator Maj. Fane Greenfield said a contingency plan does exist for the evacuation of the jail, should the need arise.
"We could probably start on it in about 15 to 20 minutes," Greenfield said. "Start to finish -- the whole jail -- would probably take an hour and a half to two hours," he said.
In an extreme emergency the entire jail could be evacuated in under an hour, he said.
The search for the source sent firefighters -- specially trained to enter and work in confined spaces -- under the Will R. Sullivan building located directly across from the Wayne County Courthouse. According to city officials, an old civil defense fallout shelter sits under Ormond Street and stretches all the way to the other end of the block on the John Street side.
The shelters have been abandoned for years and parts of them are walled in and closed off, officials said.
Goldsboro Assistant Fire Chief Frank Sasser said the smell of gasoline was traced to outside the Sullivan building and into a sewer line. He sent his confined space team in to investigate reports that a large gas tank was once buried under the building, indicated by a monitoring well located nearby.
"What they found were the remains of a gas tank, where there had been one, but no tank," Sasser said. A depression in the ground inside the fallout shelter was located opposite a wall where a sign suggested a 300 gallon gas tank had once been placed there.
"Probably to power a generator," Sasser said.
A similar shelter is located under the Wayne County Courthouse, but is now used for office space, the sheriff's office said.
Once the leak was determined not to be coming from the shelter or crawl space under the Sullivan building, firefighters turned their attention back to the sewer line outside the Sullivan building.
That sewer line runs diagonally across the street, down Chestnut Street in front of the Wayne County Sheriff's Office and jail and into a residential area.
"The smell was getting weaker over here, and growing stronger over there, so we knew it was moving. But we never did find where it was coming from," he said.
After three hours of searching, crawling around underground and investigating smells in the sewer and in the basement of the Sullivan building and the jail, the search was called off.
Sasser said the threat posed was very little to non-existent and the gas in the sewer line could have come from a car leaking gas somewhere else in the vicinity.
"We never did find where the source was coming from," he said.