The City of Henderson is offering free showers to Southwest Gas customers who don’t have hot water while the utility works to restore service to thousands of residents after a gas outage that started Tuesday.
Southwest Gas’ Facebook page was updated throughout Wednesday to reflect changes in the number of houses still without gas. The company announced that free showers would be available between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. at Heritage Park Aquatic Center, 300 Racetrack Road, until gas is fully restored.
Southwest Gas sent representatives to the Clark County Heritage Museum, 1830 S. Boulder Highway, to help customers sign up for online accounts and text message alerts until 9 p.m. Thursday. Inconvenienced customers were given $25 gift cards to a variety of restaurants.
Desarie Lopez, 26, and her 7-year-old daughter Giselle went to the museum to touch base with the utility. Their family’s gas went out on Tuesday and wasn’t turned back on until late Wednesday night.
Giselle asked if they could go stay at her grandma’s house, but she lives in the neighborhood too, Lopez said.
“Everybody’s gas is out!” Giselle said, adding that she didn’t even think her school had hot water.
But Lopez said it wasn’t too bad, despite waking up with the indoor temperature in the low 50s.
“I work all day, so it really only affected us in the morning when we had to shower,” she said.
While conducting a survey Tuesday afternoon, crews found traces of gas in some dirt around the area of Old Vegas Trail, Boulder Highway and Wagonwheel Drive, utility spokesman Stephen Miller said. Crews worked throughout the day Tuesday to find the leak in a four-inch pipe about four feet underground.
While most leaks are caused from irresponsible digging and easily located, Miller said it took some time to find the culprit from Tuesday’s outage. To repair the damaged pipe, gas had to be turned off in the area, leaving about 5,000 customers without gas service Tuesday night. About 9 a.m. Wednesday, Southwest Gas reported 4,724 customers didn’t have natural gas in the area. By about 9 p.m. Wednesday, service had been restored to about 3,500 homes, Miller said.
Southwest Gas employees from neighboring states were called in to help restore gas to the Henderson homes. Of the 100 people working on relighting customers’ pilot lights, 20 were from southern and central Arizona and Southern California, according to company spokeswoman Sonya Headen.
Going door-to-door is a time-consuming process, according to the company’s website. In order to return service to the affected homes and businesses, someone 18 years or older must be present. Crews will try three times, per house, and after that the resident will have to call the utility to send someone out.
But Miller said they’ll be sent to the top of the list.
The crews are “working as quickly and safely as possible,” Headen said. It is difficult to estimate when service will be returned because the outage is so vast, but employees will work 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily until all customers have been serviced, Headen said. Workers had to turn the gas meter off at each house to keep air out of the line and return to turn it back on and light the pilot.
Headen advised homeowners against lighting their own pilot lights.
“We want to do this so we can be sure it’s done safely,” she said.
Schools, hospitals and assisted living facilities were the first to have their gas restored, Headen said. Then crews moved on to businesses and homes.
Las Vegas Review-Journal writer Wesley Juhl contributed to this report.
Contact Kimberly De La Cruz at kdelacruz@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Find her on Twitter: @KimberlyinLV
Source: southwest - Google News http://ift.tt/1zjw4kV
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar