AN apartment block destroyed on Saturday morning in a blast that claimed the lives of at least five Islanders was not connected to mains gas, the head of the utility company has said.
Islands Energy Group chief executive Jo Cox also confirmed that gas engineers had worked recently at the site.
She added that the mains gas network had not been affected by the explosion at the Haut du Mont apartment block and the area was safe.
Speaking to the media outside IEG’s headquarters at La Collette yesterday, Mrs Cox said: ‘We want to join everyone in Jersey in sending our thoughts and prayers to the families who have lost families during this tragic time.
‘Islands Energy continues to work with the emergency services during this recovery period. I want to reassure people that we believe this is an isolated incident and not an issue with our gas network.
‘We will work with the emergency services and the various channels to ensure we are providing the data needed to understand exactly what happened during this incident.’
Asked if she thought IEG’s gas infrastructure had a role in the explosion, she replied: ‘No, I don’t. The buildings were not running on gas. There was a mains network running past it but [gas] was not being used for heating. There is no damage to the mains network.’
Mrs Cox added: ‘The mains has not been affected; the mains is also turned off. We have assessed the area three days in a row and there is no gas detected at all. It is 100% safe. We need to run through the investigations to understand where the explosion initiated. There is an assumption that it may be gas; we don’t know that for a fact.’
Mrs Cox also confirmed that IEG had been working at the site beforehand.
‘There was work leading up to the event but as I reassure you there were no meters in the property. It was recent work but they were disconnected meters.’
Mrs Cox confirmed that IEG engineers were also called out on Friday night, when the Fire Service were contacted by residents after they smelled gas.
‘It is standard procedure that we get called by the Fire and Rescue Service; we attended on site with them. I am looking at all the recordings and exactly what happened at that time. We received recordings into the call centre from Fire and Rescue reporting that it had been reported to us. We always attend; it is standard protocol.’
Asked if it was assumed that gas had caused the explosion, Mrs Cox said: ‘It is very typical for an explosion of this size that it is gas, but I want to bring us back to the fact that we don’t know that, and I don’t want to set hares running.’
Mrs Cox said that the engineer who attended Haut du Mont with the fire service on Friday evening still needed to be interviewed but that the standard protocol when a gas leak is suspected had been followed, although she could not yet confirm if the site had been declared safe at that time.
She said that she anticipated that there would be a clearer picture of what happened by Wednesday, although IEG would not be making a statement then.
