Crews from the Petal Fire Department, Petal Police Department and CenterPoint Energy spent a good part of Friday afternoon repairing a natural gas leak, which spewed out on Kola Street near 3rd Avenue in Petal.
Ward 6 Alderman Craig Bullock said the leak was caused by work under the road that was recently conducted by CenterPoint.
“The mailman stopped me a little while ago and said he smelled gas really bad down here,” he said. “I looked down and I could see the gas spewing out of the ground.
“I called the fire department and police department, and just wanted to make sure to get the road blocked off, because school pickup is starting soon. We’ve got a lot of houses close here, and there’s just some uncertainty (with it).”
Bullock said he was unsure of how long repair work would take, as the scope of the work was not yet clear.
“I don’t know if they’re going to have to dig that whole area up,” he said. “If it was a water line, we could just reach up somewhere and cut it off.
“I don’t know if they have any kind of gas cutoff or not.”
At any rate, Bullock said there was no immediate danger to any of the residents in the area.
“One of the firemen was telling me that even if you had a flame, that it’s not going to explode,” he said. “It’s just going to burn, like you see at the gas plants.
“So I don’t think there’s any significant danger, but you certainly don’t want to have kids walking through here, cars running through or anything like that.”
