Fencing Company Admits Failure to Call Before Digging

By Michael Owens
Published: March 13, 2009

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A McCall Commercial Fencing official blames haste for the natural gas leak that shut down much of downtown Bristol on Tuesday.

Company Vice President Brad Sorrow was supposed to have called underground utility regulator Tennessee One-Call for permission to dig in advance. That way, his construction crew would know where the danger was when digging fence posts behind the Kil’n Time pottery shop.

“The ball was dropped,” Sorrow said by telephone Tuesday.

Instead, he called 30 minutes after a company auger ruptured the gas line and police and firefighters sprang to action. Sorrow was at a construction site in Kentucky when first told by cell phone that trouble had erupted in Bristol. So he called the regulatory agency out of anger, to set up a request for the return dig.

“My being out of town might have had something to do with why I didn’t” call ahead of time, he said. “I’m not making excuses. It should have been done. There should have been checks and balances in place, but there weren’t.”

McCall Commercial Fencing, based in Johnson City, was completing the last steps of a renovation at Kil’n Time that began last year.

To get it done quickly, the auger crew began drilling even though the ground had not been marked by Tennessee One-Call for potential hot spots, Sorrow said.

“It slipped through the cracks in our haste to accommodate our customers,” Sorrow said of skipping the call.

Gas line owner Atmos Energy, based in Dallas, Texas, took over the work site for nearly three hours as it patched the leak. All the while, about 10 downtown businesses were evacuated and streets were closed and traffic re-routed.

In Tennessee, failure to call before digging is a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to 48 hours in jail, a $2,500 fine, or both.

Sorrow said he has not heard from the Sullivan County District Attorney’s office, which has declined to comment to the Bristol Herald Courier on whether the incident is being investigated.

An Atmos Energy spokesman said the company is busy estimating the amount of gas lost and the cost of capping the line. It will take days to tally the fencing company’s bill, the Atmos Energy spokesman said.

“I hope the client will let us come in and finish the project,” Sorrow said. “It was an unfortunate accident that happened. That’s just what it was, an accident.”

mowens@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2549