Does Lawrence Smell Funny?

May 1st, 2006 | Filed under Lawrence

A house in Old West Lawrence, which had been gutted and turned into apartments, burned down over the weekend. I bummer to be sure, but not that out of the ordinary in a college town. Someone leaves a cigarette burning and all of the sudden one of the older building on the east side of town (what is called Old West Lawrence) is in flames. Read the story here.

Needless to say I work down the street from the house in question, and found it a bit odd that a day after the fire there was still a large group of fire officials, a HAZMAT crew and vehicles up and down 9th street with city crews checking out the entrances to manhole covers.

Being the super-news-sleuth that I am (what? I took fundamentals of journalism), I searched for something in regards to the fire on LJWorld.com and bumped into this article. It wasn’t at the top of the page, where I would put it, but rather in the breaking news sidebar…which usually doesn’t post much more than the local little league scores.

It turns out that the fire was started by a gasoline leak and the smell is still lingering in the area. City, County and State officials were on the scene all day in an attempt to figure out the source of the odor. I relayed all of this to the girlfriend as I picked her up from class (I know, how great am I?) and when I mentioned that there was a gas station across the street from the house she immediately pointed out that we had received a lot of rain over the past few days. This sent my mind racing to last time we had a lot of rain when a local gas station had its fuel tanks surface after the rain water had swelled up underneath them. Here is a photo and the original article.

Anyway, I guess I wonder if the same thing could have happened over the weekend to these gas containers? I work about a block from the neighborhood in question and the idea of gasoline flowing underneath my desk doesn’t really make me the happiest camper in the world. Hopefully we’ll know more tomorrow but until then…courage.

P.S. Why is it that where ever I move some type of fire-inducing gas leak follows.

Update: Apparently gasoline has been found in the sewer system around the area but no one has figured out exactly where it has been coming from. Check out the article here.

Update 2: Here is the latest development. Looks like the City finally has things under control.