Gas Supply To 1,000 Houses Hit After Fire In Damaged Pipeline | Pune News – Times of India

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PUNE: Gas supply to at least 1,000 households and five CNG pumps in the Sinhagad Road area was affected as a major fire broke out following damage to two underground gas pipelines of the Maharashtra Natural Gas Limited (MNGL) near Rajaram bridge shortly after Thursday midnight.
No one was injured in the blaze. “Gas supply to over 55 housing societies in the Navshya Maruti, Parvati, Manik Baug, Vadgaon Dhayari, Hingne Khurd and Narhe areas was affected due to the fire as the supply from the main station had to be stopped to control the blaze,” an MNGL officer said.
“The supply was restored to 35 societies by 8.45am on Friday and to the remaining societies by 10.30am,” he said.
Gas supply to five CNG pumps near Rajaram bridge area was affected too. MNGL officials had alerted the pumps in Warje, Dhankawadi and Katraj, while maintaining an adequate CNG supply to these pumps to tackle the load of customers from the Sinhagad Road area.
In a statement released later, the MNGL blamed the excavation work by the contractor of a state-owned power utility for the damage to its pipelines and the resultant fire, which covered a 2m radius open area and took at least four hours for the city fire brigade to douse. The contractor has been carrying out the excavation work on a 35-40m stretch, the statement read.
The MNGL statement stated that a day before too, the same excavation work had damaged the underground pipeline and its response team had restored the pipeline within five hours.
In the subsequent incident, which was reported around 12.10am on Friday, a high-pressure 10-inch steel pipeline and a 125mm medium intensity polyethylene pipeline were damaged. The fire was completely doused around 4am after the authorities reduced the gas pressure.
Officials from the Maharashtra State Electricity Transmission Company Limited (MSETCL) said the digging work near the Rajaram bridge was for their Parvati to Kothrud underground 132KV cable laying. However, they denied that the excavation work was behind the fire.
Prakash Kursange, the superintendent engineer of MSETCL, told TOI, “For the past 10 days, the underground 132KV cable laying work is underway. We were informed by the MNGL authorities that there is some leakage that they need to identify and accordingly requested us to halt the work for two days. We stopped our work on January 10 and later this incident occured. The incident of fire has happened because of MNGL’s prior leakage and MSETCL’s work has nothing to do with it.”
Pune’s chief fire officer Devendra Potphode told TOI, “It was a tough task to control the fire because of high gas pressure. Our main aim was to control the spread of the gas to avoid any untoward incident.”
He said, “Flames were billowing from three different spots. Initially, we had planned to douse the fire at two spots so that we could concentrate only at one spot. But, the intensity of the heat was quite high. So, we decided to use a controlled burning method to douse the fire.”
Potphode said the fire tenders were spraying water on the flames and preventing the spread of the gas. “The MNGL officials had stopped the supply of gas from their main supply station. Around 4am, when the gas pressure came down, we doused the fire,” he added.
(With inputs by
Piyush Bhusari)

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