YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Nearly a year after a natural gas explosion rocked the Realty Tower downtown, a National Transportation Safety Board report points to inaccurate records regarding the gas line.

The NTSB on Wednesday released 54 documents related to its investigation of the May 28, 2024, explosion that killed one man, injured several people and closed businesses for weeks. 

An NTSB spokesman said it’s not a final report.

“It contains factual information only,” the spokesman said in an email, “Analysis, probable cause & contributing factors will be determined at the conclusion of the investigation. A typical NTSB investigation can take 12-24 months to complete.”

The building, deemed structurally unstable, was demolished. 

The explosion occurred after a scrap removal crew working in the building’s vault cut a natural gas line that was believed to be inactive. The line, however, was active, and natural gas was released, resulting in the explosion about six minutes later.

One of the documents released Wednesday, the NTSB group chair’s pipeline operations factual report, said the gas distribution system involved in the accident is owned and operated by Enbridge Gas Ohio. Natural gas was delivered to Realty Tower through a 3-inch diameter natural gas main line that was installed in 1973. 

“On June 8, 2008, the inside meter [previously inside the basement] was disconnected and removed … from the site because the customer requested moving the manifold outside in conjunction with building remodeling,” the report states.

A customer service representative was responsible for completing the work and updated the work order in the system. That representative left instructions in the work order to advise construction and maintenance to locate the curb box and turn the customer off at the curb valve.

“There is no record of a work order to locate and turn off the gas at the curb in response to these instructions,” the report said. “It is not clear if or how the customer service representative communicated the instructions to either dispatch” or the construction and maintenance department.

At the time of the explosion, natural gas service was provided to Realty through an active service line and 27-meter manifold that was installed in April 2009 for The Frangos Group. Meters weren’t installed at that time.

Enbridge’s “records indicated that the one-inch diameter inactive service line was manually cut and abandoned on Sept. 11, 2015, the record was inaccurate,” the report states. 

Such work orders to manually cut and abandon an inactive service line would typically be assigned to a construction and maintenance crew “who would perform the work and complete the documentation electronically in the Customer Care System,” it says.

The work was entered manually by a customer relations specialist.

Enbridge Ohio “expected there to be a paper form … that led to the manual entry, but no record has been found at the time of this report,” the pipeline report states.

The company’s “documentation shows that the ‘curb box off’ and ‘cut code’ boxes are checked, indicating that the curb valve was closed, and the service line was cut, physically removing its connection to the main.”

In February 2017, the Ohio Utilities Protection Service was called to alert Enbridge Ohio (then Dominion) staff that their unmarked gas pipeline was struck by an excavator and may have a possible leak, the report said. 

“The responding Dominion employee(s) indicated that there was no gas leak, the line was not hit, the line was not marked and the line had been abandoned” per the construction and maintenance crew, according to the report.

It goes on to say that during a pipeline safety inspection at Dominion’s (now Enbridge Ohio’s) Western Operating Center in 2019, PUCO staff “pointed out a lack of consistency in how ‘inactive’ service lines are shut off and requested” the company review its processes surrounding shutting off inside piping.

Dominion/Enbridge responded to PUCO’s letter, acknowledging the gap in such inspections for inactive service lines, provided a report of how many of those lines existed in its records and committed to completing the inspections, according to NTSB’s pipeline operations report.

In 2020, PUCO staff requested an update on the inspections. The company didn’t provide any records or update on the process at the time. PUCO sent a notice of probable noncompliance letter for failing to make records readily available.

“In that letter, staff also requested an update on the status of inspecting the overdue inside piping and ensuring the gap in inspection scheduling was filled going forward,” the report states.

The company responded, indicating it was working through the backlog of overdue inspections for the inactive piping and would review the list quarterly to ensure inspections were completed as required.

After the Realty accident, PUCO reviewed the system that showed the service line involved as abandoned. 

“PUCO discovered there were several groups of services in the system that may be listed as abandoned inaccurately,” the NTSB group chair’s report states. “One group looks like they were shifted to an abandoned status through an IT push to clean up some data.”

To get a sense of the breadth of the problem in downtown Youngstown, the commission “picked a group of services with abandonment dates in a similar range to the one involved in this event to be excavated and several of those were also found to still be live,” the report states.

Since that discovery, the company has started a broader program to look at services across Ohio, identifying a few groups of services needing further investigation to determine if they’re abandoned, according to the report. The company will update PUCO this year. And Enbridge Ohio is performing field excavation to confirm the status of lines where there is no clear record.

The company has taken a list of safety actions since the Realty explosion. Among them is confirmation of service abandonments.

“A work order is issued for the abandonment of a service line,” the report states. “Once that work order is completed, the status of the service line is automatically changed in EG-Ohio digital records from ‘active’ to ‘abandoned.’”

The status can also be changed manually.

After the Realty incident, Enbridge Ohio started a “prioritized quality control initiative” to confirm that all service lines in its digital records that had been manually changed from active to abandoned “were physically abandoned,” the report states.

Pictured at top: Damage is seen at the Realty Tower after the May 28, 2024, explosion.