‘This is not fixed yet’: West Side residents await repairs to damaged appliances

Two weeks after a high-pressure water main break infiltrated its natural gas distribution lines, Mountaineer Gas says it has restored service to 100% of Charleston’s West Side.

But while gas has been accessible to everyone in the community since Friday, some households are still waiting on their water-damaged appliances to be repaired or replaced, meaning the ordeal is not over for the West Side community.

“There are some customers remaining without the use of some of their appliances due to water damage occurring,” the company said in an update Monday. “Restoration to individual customers with appliances damaged due to water will continue. MGC and contractors will be reassessing customer appliance damage this week.”

Sarah Stone, her husband and their 3-year-old daughter are still warming their Vine Street home with electric space heaters and electric blankets. They’re in their third week without a working furnace and water heater after both were damaged by the water main break earlier this month.

“It kind of has felt like the Twilight Zone,” Stone said Monday. “Everything is harder. We have to pack up the whole family and go to different places to take showers. So, we’re only showering every few days.”

Stone said she feels like her family and others in their situation have been forgotten.

“This is not fixed yet,” she said of the gas outage. “There are people that are still without, and we’re in week three. It really does feel like the world believes it’s over, and it’s not.”

The gas outage started Friday, Nov. 10 because of a “significant sustained water leak” that infiltrated Mountaineer Gas’s natural gas distribution system, the company said. Gas company workers and contractors had to drain and dry 46 miles of gas lines and go door-to-door to restore service. About 100 customers are pending inspection due to customer availability, the gas company said Monday.

Moses Skaff, senior vice president for Mountaineer Gas, said the company has had nine contractors out working on appliances for West Side residences, and beginning Tuesday it will add a tenth.

“We’ll have close to 40 crews working on appliances only, in addition to our own crews going back and making sure appliances are still up and running and things are doing well on their appliances,” Skaff said.

Skaff said the company does not yet have an estimate for how many appliances have been damaged or destroyed as a result of the water infiltrating the lines.

“As we found appliance issues, we’ve sent them out to all nine of these contractors and they are very slow and getting back us ones that they have fixed and ones that were not an issue to begin with,” Skaff said.

The company is also working to patch more than 270 holes that workers dug to clear the gas lines of water, Skaff said.

Al Marino Inc., a plumbing, air-heating and electrical company on the West Side, is one of the 10 contractors working to repair and replace damaged water heaters, furnaces and stoves in affected houses.

Company president Jay Marino said they’ve taken 300 to 400 calls about West Side residences with broken appliances. The company does not yet know how many appliances it has restored or repaired.

“We’re not doing any statistics right now,” he said. “Mainly we’re just trying to get it restored. Especially [because] the temperature took a dip. And obviously, those with no heat have special needs.”

Outside the company’s Fourth Street office on Monday afternoon sat several appliances. All of them were damaged and non salvageable, he said. Some of them have to be replaced instead of repaired because they don’t meet today’s code standards for appliances, he said.

Marino said in 50 years in the business, he’s never seen anything like what happened when the water infiltrated the gas lines. He compared the damage to the sporadic effects of tornadoes.

“There could be one home that’s almost untouched, and the home right next door, it had water in all the appliances,” Marino said. “The system is not meant to distribute water, and so there’s no real way of knowing where did it go? Why did it skip one property and [not] the next one…”