Fire officials say the woman injured in a house explosion at 1905 S.W. Navajo in Topeka is 73-year-old Lucy Tolliver. Tolliver was taken in serious condition to the University of Kansas Medical Center Monday morning. There, she remains in the Intensive Care Unit.
Tolliver was injured after a gas explosion leveled her home. It happened when workers in the area struck a gas line while installing a sprinkler system at another home.
A spokesperson with Kansas Gas Service says with the exception of two homes on either side of Tolliver's, most of the area has service. Monday afternoon, the utility company shut off the gas to 77 residences following the explosion.
Fire investigators call the explosion "the perfect storm." Determination drives them to find out how it happened. Topeka Fire Investigator Michael Martin says, "That's going to take pressure testing the lines, it's going to take digging up and seeing exactly where and how bad the break was, and just trying to piece by piece determine how we got from point A to point B."
He confirms during a sprinkler system installation at a neighboring home, the installer hit a gas line. But we asked how a ruptured line in one yard led to an explosion in another. Martin says, "Natural gas is lighter than air and it has a propensity to dissipate. But it will also take the path of least resistance. If you have a break underground and there are fissures in the ground or the ground is dry, it has the ability to travel underground. And there are many different ways where it could travel into a structure."
Investigators say normally when a gas line breaks, the gas escapes into the air and dissipates, not causing an extreme emergency. Their goal now is to determine what made this situation different. Martin says, "Everything we do today will teach us and we will learn and hopefully avoid these situations in the future."
Fire officials expect the investigation to continue for weeks to come. They say
1-800-DIG-SAFE was called prior to the sprinkler system install.
