One person was killed and five others injured when a regional gas pipeline ruptured Thursday, causing a massive explosion and fireball that forced the evacuation of a mobile home park, according to reports.
The 30-inch-wide natural gas pipeline in Lincoln County is under pressure, so the rupture at about 1:40 a.m. caused widespread damage in the area, including to nearby railroad tracks, officials said.
County emergency management chief Don Gilliam said the flames reached about 300 feet in the air. The blast was so huge that it even showed up on radar, WKYT-TV meteorologist Chris Bailey said on Twitter.
At least six mobile homes caught fire, Gilliam said, according to NBC News.
“We still have an active scene,” he said, adding that the fire at the breach site was out.
Witnesses told Kentucky’s WLEX that they heard a loud explosion and saw a ball of fire.
“Got into my truck, was going up to my girlfriend’s house and seen what looked like an atomic bomb going off, basically,” Jerry Sinkhorn told the station.
“Seen a big cloud of dust go up and could hear the thrust off of it. I knew what it was. It was a gas line, ’cause I’ve heard when the last one went off up there at the gas plant,” he added.
Sue Routin told WLEX that she was awakened by “a big roar and fire going all the way up in the sky as far as you could see.”
“Our windows were shaking really bad, and our doors and the ground, you could hear the ground just moving and tumbling and rolling,” she continued.
“And then we got to feeling the heat from the fire, so we got in our vehicle and took off to get away from it,” she said. “We thought, he actually thought it could’ve been an airplane crash, because the rolling was really loud and it was just so bright it lit up the whole, it lit up everything around us.”
Authorities said the rupture involved the Texas Eastern Transmission pipeline, which is owned and operated by Enbridge.
It stretches more than 9,000 miles, from the Mexican border in Texas to New York City.
A statement from the company based in Calgary, Canada, said, “Enbridge is aware of and is responding to a rupture on the Texas Eastern system in Lincoln County.”
About 75 people in the Indian Camp trailer park in the Moreland community were evacuated to the New Hope Baptist Church in Stanford.
Officials said they don’t yet know if others are missing or unaccounted for.
With Post wires
