The Ector County Sheriff's Office solved the mystery of who turned off a gas valve in West Odessa, leaving hundreds of people without gas and spurring a costly restoration effort.
It was a sheriff's deputy. Lt. Mike Griffis was attempting to turn off a gas meter after midnight in an alleyway near Tripp Avenue and West 26th Street, according to Sheriff Mark Donaldson, but instead the deputy turned off a main valve at a regulator station that provided gas to many homes.
Later in the morning, provider Atmos Energy discovered 379 customers were left without gas.
"He was trying to cut it off so it didn't spew out and catch on fire," Donaldson said Wednesday, but the sheriff added it was the wrong move. "We don't turn valves. We just aren't supposed to mess with stuff that we don't know what we're doing with."
The sheriff said his office is reviewing the incident internally but that Griffis won't face reprimand because his intention was noble. He had not discussed the issue with him by Wednesday afternoon, he said, because the deputy works nights and was off work.
To bring the gas back online quickly, the company called in workers from surrounding cities including Big Spring and Lubbock and assembled a crew of about 40, according to Brandi Price, an Atmos public affairs manager in Midland.
When a regulator station goes off, the gas must purged and pressured back up. Each home must be lit back up individually, Price said, calling the job a "huge hardship."
The crews had restored about 85 percent of the gas by midnight, Atmos reported. And by about noon, Price said they had finished.
In what Donaldson described as a miscommunication, the sheriff's office did not tell the gas company that the deputy turned off the valve. Doing so might have made for a quick fix, Donaldson said. But as a result, gas bled out for several hours until people started to call the utility company and complain.
Atmos workers went out to the area at about 10 a.m., Price said, and suspected foul play when they noticed the valve had been turned off.
Price did not mention the deputy's involvement when asked about the cause of the outage but later acknowledged the sheriff had called that morning to inform them and apologize.
The sheriff in an interview was forthright about the shutdown.
"I'm sure that did inconvenience some people," Donaldson said. "And I wish it didn't happen."
Copyright 2013 - Odessa American, Texas
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
