It was a lazy Monday night in the West University neighborhood: The sun had just set, the beer had been bought and the barbecues were being lit. At one house at East 15th Avenue and Ferry Street, a group of college students were about to light the grill on their porch.
A hand was bringing a flame down to the coals when a shrill voice yelled: “Stop, Stop! Don’t light it, can’t you smell the gas?”
The smell wasn’t coming from their house. The whole center of the neighborhood stank like a kitchen with an unlit burner left going on an old stove.
Two blocks west, construction crews digging on High Street had cut through a line that was now hissing natural gas into the air, so much that Eugene police and both the Eugene and Springfield fire departments cordoned off four square blocks and even evacuated some homes.
On the 1500 block of Mill Alley, Jordan Miser’s charcoal was already burning when a firefighter approached him. Miser said the firefighter made him first douse the coals then leave his apartment. He stood bewildered with a couple friends at the corner of E. 15th Avenue and Mill Street, watching the fire engines flashing their lights, blocking off the source at High Street.
Approaching High Street on foot from the east, the smell intensified and began causing headaches. Where the firefighters stood warning off bystanders at the intersection of E. 15th Avenue and High Street, the smell grew even stronger, and its effects worsened.
Steve Sechrist, a spokesman for the local gas company NW Natural, said the gas itself isn’t toxic. What makes people sick is the odor added to the gas to make it detectable.
“It’s not poisonous,” Sechrist said. The real danger is explosion.
By 10:30 p.m. that danger was all but gone. A neon-vested crew from NW Natural swarmed over the intersection of East 16th Avenue and Mill Street (including someone in a yellow body suit complete with gas mask), and they drilled through concrete to stop the leak. No one was hurt. No one got sick, the fire department said, and after an hour and a half of excitement, West University was again a lazy student neighborhood on a warm August night.