Early Tuesday morning, thousands of people woke up without gas, hot water, or heat.
According to the company, the outage occurred after the required routine valve maintenance within the pipeline.
“We were doing some routine annual maintenance on our pipeline system and we had an unexpected decrease of pressure downstream of that valve from some of that work we were doing,” said Brian Taylor, gas operations manager with Avista.
Crews are working to restore service by going door to door and re-lighting each home and business impacted.
The company said it brought in crews from several northwest states to help restore service.
“Before we introduce gas back into the system, we need to go through every residence and shut the gas meter off prior to introducing gas back into the system,” said Taylor.
The company said they are working to turn off gas at remaining homes and businesses by the end of Wednesday, so they can work to bring them back on.
“We have a critical customer list that we identify,” Taylor said. “We look at any hospitals, schools, those types of businesses and we get them on first and then we work out from there to the more rural residential areas,” he added.
They say around 2,800 customers in the downtown Ashland area have their gas turned back on.
“We’re really trying to work quickly and safely to get the gas back on in this area,” Taylor said.
A map of restoration progress and previous communications can be found on myavista.com
Natural gas safety information can be found at https://www.myavista.com/safety.
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