Florida Explosions Leads to Agreement between Fire Department and Gas Company

Allan and Margaret Scherer had just finished dinner Nov. 3 when their two-story, 10,285-square-foot home exploded and burst into flames.

A few minutes earlier, their chef, who had started to leave through the garage, returned briefly.

“He said, ‘Mr. Scherer, there’s something strange going on in your garage. I think you’d better take a look,'” Allan Scherer remembers. “With those words, he walked out.”

When Scherer entered the garage, he saw a pipe that housed his telephone line spewing water, rocks and dirt onto the floor.

“Everything was coming out of that pipe with a lot of force,” he said. “I had no idea what was happening, but I knew I had to call someone.

“I took two steps into the house, and the thing blew up. It was an explosion so large that it blew the garage door off and knocked me to the floor of the hall. I got up, got my wife and dog out, and called 911.”

The blast and fire at about 8:15 p.m. engulfed the three-car garage on the west side of 417 Primavera Way, destroying three Mercedes vehicles inside.

The Scherers — Allan, 83, and Margaret, 80 — escaped safely with their 14-year-old Dalmatian, Domino. Allan Scherer suffered minor burns to his arm.

Twenty-eight emergency vehicles and 54 personnel from Palm Beach Fire-Rescue, West Palm Beach Fire Rescue and Palm Beach County Fire Rescue responded.

Pipe Emits Natural Gas

Within minutes of arriving, crews found an open pipe emitting natural gas in the southeast corner of the garage. Firefighters shut off utilities and gas at multiple locations, including the meter, pool heater and outdoor generator. But gas continued to feed the fire through a telephone pipe that ran from underneath the road into the garage.

For six hours, emergency crews tried unsuccessfully to get the fire under control because it took Florida Public Utilities workers two to four hours to clamp the gas line. By that time, the fire had spread. The house, valued at more than $6.5 million, was destroyed.

“(A) gas-fed fire, coming through the house phone lines due to the gas line and phone line fusing together underground, caused difficulty and delay in controlling the fire,” said a Palm Beach Fire-Rescue “debriefing” report.

FPU workers couldn’t find the valve to the gas pipe that was fueling the fire and, “after nearly four hours, FPU excavated the line and clamped (it),” the report said.

But FPU operations manager Doug Moreland said it took FPU workers two hours to clamp the line. He wouldn’t answer specific questions about the fire because FPU is investigating the incident.

Mark McDonald, president of Boston-based NatGas Consulting, has been working on gas line safety issues for more than 20 years. He’s not involved in investigating this case but discussed it after reviewing police photos and the state fire marshal’s report.

“Gas companies need to have an underground external shut off that’s accessible for these reasons,” McDonald said. “Unfortunately, federal and state regulators don’t enforce this. When the gas company is on site, the gas should be shut off within minutes. The gas company should have control of their gas system in an emergency. This is a chronic problem all over the country.”

Attorney Justus Reid, who represents the Scherers, said he’s not sure whether the Scherers will file a lawsuit.

“Mr. and Mrs. Scherer were terrified the night of the explosion, then learned their home and contents were totally destroyed, while the gas company fumbled around looking for shut-off valves,” Reid said.

Fire Spurs Agreement

Town Councilman Robert Wildrick questioned why firefighters waited for FPU workers to clamp the gas lines. Why didn’t firefighters do it themselves? Wildrick asked at a Public Safety Committee meeting in March.

Deputy Fire Chief Darrel Donatto said FPU doesn’t allow towns to have maps to their gas lines.

But Wildrick, committee chairman, directed Donatto to obtain access to those maps.

“It’s very important for our public safety employees to have knowledge of our infrastructure so that in case of an emergency they can take matters into their own hands to protect the community,” Wildrick said in a recent interview.

Donatto worked with Boca Raton Fire-Rescue Division Chief Norm Engel and FPU officials to hammer out an agreement that will allow firefighters from both municipalities access to FPU’s digital maps. Engel said he has been working to obtain those maps for 21/2 years and recently finalized Boca’s agreement.

“Chief Donatto jumped on the bandwagon and helped me,” Engel said. “They’ll use the same language for all fire-rescue agencies that request this information.”

On July 10, Public Safety Director Kirk Blouin signed Palm Beach’s agreement with FPU. It keeps the maps confidential to the public but allows firefighters access in emergencies, Donatto said.

“Having that mapping allows us to take some action before FPU gets there,” he said. “We could find those lines, isolate that section of pipe that’s leaking and clamp it pretty quickly.”

Cause ‘Undetermined’

The state fire marshal’s report ruled the cause of the Primavera Way fire “undetermined” because safety concerns prevented investigators from thoroughly inspecting the house. But that report also says an FPU worker identified a leak that was caused by a telephone pipe resting on the underground gas pipe.

Photos taken by police and the town’s fire marshal show the gas pipe and telephone pipe lying on each other in the ground. Photos taken after the pipes were removed show holes in the pipes.

FPU representatives declined to answer specific questions related to the fire, but Moreland gave a written statement.

The gas main “appeared to have been compromised by an external force. A close inspection of the damaged section of pipe showed no signs of corrosion, nor a lessening of pipe wall thickness or any other deterioration of, or internal defect in, the pipe. … At this time, the cause of the damage to our pipeline remains unknown and we are continuing to investigate this incident,” the statement said.

Moreland added that the pipe showed surface rust typical of underground buried pipeline, but “there was no substantial corrosion that would compromise the structural integrity of the pipe.”

McDonald disagreed.

“From looking at the photos, it appears the breach at the pipe at the bottom is corrosion,” he said. “The photos also show corrosion further down the main. In looking at the pictures, I suspect that corrosion was a factor in the leak.

“Generally gas lines should be kept away from other utilities for this reason,” he continued. “It’s not unusual to see utilities close by — above or below a gas line — in a congested area. However they should be kept a fair distance away.”

Since 2010, FPU has been replacing the town’s decades-old steel gas pipes with longer-lasting plastic materials.

The gas lines on Primavera Way hadn’t been replaced and upgraded at the time of the Scherer fire. The day after the fire, FPU replaced all gas lines on the street because of the damage to the gas main and its proximity to several other utility service lines, Moreland said.

Losses

After watching their house burn, the Scherers checked into The Colony for the night. The next day, they rented a house on the island and, in January, bought a house in the North End. The same month, they sold the Primavera Way property with the fire-damaged house for $6.5 million. The town issued a demolition permit for the house in March and it was razed in May, according to town records.

Scherer said his insurance company is investigating the fire.

He and his wife lost “everything of serious personal value,” most of which was in the master bedroom suite over the garage. Scherer is the former executive director of the U.S. Polo Association and a key figure in the development of the Wellington professional polo community.

“The only clothes I had left was what I had on for dinner,” he said. “Almost everything personal — clothing, jewelry — was destroyed. The rest of the house didn’t have direct fire damage, but it had smoke and water damage.

“The whole thing was so bizarre,” Scherer said. “It’s one of those things that was very unusual, but it happened. We are so lucky to be alive and lucky that we weren’t sleeping at the time it happened.”

— mdargan@ pbdailynews.com Twitter: @MicheleDargan