By Patrick Varine
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
MURRYSVILLE, Pa. — Thirty-four students from Franklin Regional Middle School and eight adults, both from the school and local businesses, were taken by ambulance to UPMC East in Monroeville on Wednesday after an odor, initially suspected to be natural gas, was detected in the school and along the Route 22 corridor in Murrysville, officials said.
The middle school and Heritage and Newlonsburg elementary schools were evacuated because of the odor. Fire officials later cleared all three for re-entry, according to district spokeswoman Cara Zanella.
Assistant Superintendent Mary Catherine Reljac said the high school was briefly evacuated but was deemed safe and students from the other schools were taken there.
Peoples Natural Gas spokesman Barry Kukovich said workers checked company facilities along Route 22 and found no leaks. Local firefighters cleared a number of buildings along the corridor and didn’t find any leaks, according to fireman Bill Yant of Murrysville Volunteer Fire Company No. 1.
“Right now, it doesn’t seem to be coming from any of our facilities,” Kukovich said.
Frank Mack, a communications project manager for Dominion, which operates a natural gas storage facility in Delmont, said company officials were in contact with Westmoreland County Emergency Management throughout the morning.
“We did a thorough review of our facilities in the area, including the Oakford storage facility (in Delmont), and we’re pretty confident that the source of the gas odor isn’t on our end,” Mack said.
Yant said the first report came from a woman driving along Route 22.
“So if she smelled it first, and then it somehow got back to the school, not to make a bad pun, but that really smells like something coming off the highway,” Yant said.
Police Chief Tom Seefeld said calls about the odor began coming in around 9:30 a.m., and his department assisted firefighters and emergency responders throughout the day.
“They think what happened is that whatever the substance was, it got into the air intake and got into buildings that way,” he said.
Kukovich said he believed a passing truck on the highway could have been leaking odorant that spread with the wind. Peoples Natural Gas does not run tanker trucks through the area, he said.
“We get a couple calls a year like this, and a lot of times that’s what it turns out to be,” he said.
Seefeld said the odor was reported only in structures on the north side of Route 22.
Yant said people were not actually smelling the gas — it is odorless — but rather the potent mercaptan that is added to help detect when there is a leak.
“The thing with natural gas is, it’s lighter than air. It rises,” Yant said. “It’s also usually confined to one area, and we had 3 or 4 miles of highway where the smell was reported.”
Yant said a small amount of mercaptan, particularly if it is concentrated, has an intensely unpleasant odor and could have caused the large number of incidents that occurred Wednesday.
“We may never know, but if I was a betting man, I’d say it was a truck coming down (Route 22),” he said.
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