(The following story by Jennifer Maloney and John Valenti appeared on the Newsday website on June 4.)
NEW YORK — The Long Island Power Authority Monday acknowledged that it took four hours to respond to a live, sparking wire that ignited a natural gas leak in St. James Monday morning.
LIPA also said it was caught off guard by the power of the rainstorm Sunday night that pulled down lines and caused outages across Long Island; the power authority had expected wind gusts of below 20 mph, while gusts actually were clocked at more than 30 mph.
The blaze, which burst out of two storm drains on Lake Avenue near the St. James LIRR station, forced the suspension of classes at a nearby elementary school and disrupted rush-hour service on the LIRR, affecting about 3,000 LIRR riders and 1,600 LIPA customers.
LIPA is conducting an internal investigation, said spokesman Bert Cunningham.
The power authority was not operating on special storm status, which would have deployed additional crews, but it did retain some of the evening crews for the later, overnight shift, Cunningham said.
LIPA had monitored weather reports and expected light to heavy rain but wind gusts of less than 20 mph, he added. “For the storm predicted,” Cunningham said, “we had reasonable staff levels.”
Under the power authority’s “triage” system, live wires are a priority. “We try to get to it as quickly as we can,” he said.
At LIPA’s Western Suffolk Division — which handles emergencies in Smithtown, Islip, Huntington and Babylon — the six crews working responded to 31 outages and downed wires between midnight and 8 Monday morning.
LIPA first learned of the downed wire at 2:14 a.m., when the St. James Fire Department reported a dangling line but could not say whether it was live, according to Cunningham.
At 2:41 a.m., Suffolk police called LIPA, reporting a downed live wire that was “on fire,” he said. The wire continued to spark until, shortly after 6 a.m., witnesses saw it fall from a tree into a street-level storm drain near the entrance to the train station parking lot on Lake Avenue.
Then, boom. Flames shot “15 to 20 feet” into the air out of storm drains on either side of Lake Avenue, said Steve Sicari, owner of the BLT Cafe on Lake Avenue.
A preliminary LIPA investigation found that the electric current surged through the metal storm drain grate and into a metal pipe, Cunningham said. The current apparently then transmitted to an adjacent steel natural gas pipe, triggering a leak, officials said.
A LIPA fault detector then “automatically cut power to the circuit,” cutting power for up to 90 minutes in the neighborhood, Cunningham said.
KeySpan said it received a report of a fire at 6:19 a.m. and arrived on the scene at 6:36 a.m. LIPA had arrived at 6:32 a.m.
KeySpan also is investigating; there were no reports before the incident of a gas leak in the area, said KeySpan spokeswoman Karen Young.
(Staff writer Bart Jones contributed to this story.)