FERRISBURGH, Vt. — On July 15, all that Jeanne Kelly and John Eisenhardt could do was watch from a safe distance as a tanker truck fire, burning more than 50 feet high, spread to a building on their property and consumed it. The first thought on their minds, Kelly said, was anguish for all the antiques inside, family heirlooms. The second was a question: ‘again?’
Twice in just over a year, a truck hauling compressed natural gas south on Route 7 stopped in front of Kelly and Eisenhardt’s property with a small fire starting in the brakes. In each case, the brake fire spread to the truck’s container and its cargo, triggering an emergency release of gas, which started an inferno that blazed for several hours and caused significant property damage.
Both trucks were part of Colchester-based NG Advantage’s “virtual pipeline,” a stream of container trucks that carry large tanks of compressed methane every day from a filling station in Milton, Vt., to a paper mill in Ticonderoga, N.Y., traveling along Interstate 89 and several state roadways on their way to the Lake Champlain Bridge at Chimney Point.
The concept — pioneered by NG Advantage — is a handy solution for manufacturers without access to natural gas pipelines. But after two large fires, the practice is sounding alarms in some of the communities that trucks pass through.
“There’s a safety issue along the whole route,” Rep. Matt Birong, D-Vergennes, said in a recent interview. He said that he and several other local officials have been working together to find out more about the trucks, but that it has been difficult to determine who regulates them.
Annie Keller, Kelly and Eisenhardt’s neighbor across the road, recently recalled running for her life from the first fire as it spread onto her property in June 2023. An ongoing insurance battle over the damage from last year’s fire made this year’s fire all the more infuriating, she said.
“Everybody said, after the first time, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen again,’ you know? And I was in full agreement. Of course, it was a total fluke,” Keller said. “And then when it happens again, instead of, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen a third time,’ it makes you almost wonder more, ‘Why did it happen a second time?’ ”
“And now, is it going to happen a third time?”
On June 1, 2023, around 11:15 p.m., Keller and her teenage son John had just finished watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals when she heard a burst of rapid-fire car horns followed by a loud pop.
“I thought it was like a gunfight, like somebody had cut somebody off,” Keller recalled from her porch recently, pointing to where she’d heard the noises coming from on Route 7. “Never in your imagination would you think it’s a truck exploding.”
When she called 911, she found out that a truck with a brake fire starting in its rear axle had been waved down by passing cars. The pop had been a tire. Just as she and John went out to look, the fire suddenly got much worse.
To prevent a catastrophic explosion, the tanker’s emergency release valve had activated — letting out all the gas in the trailer, which caught fire as it vented several stories into the air.
Keller said she and John ran, she in her gardening slippers and he barefoot, to the neighbors’ yard and then even further. “The explosion was so big,” Keller said, “our house looked like a little dollhouse in front of it.”
The fire burned for several hours before first responders could confirm it would not spread to Keller’s house. It ultimately scorched several trees, damaged the asphalt and both her and her neighbors’ yards and totaled both the tractor and the trailer, but thankfully, nobody was injured.
Just over a year later, on July 15, Keller got a call from her neighbor Kelly, with whom she’d gotten close since the first fire. It was happening again, Kelly said, 75 feet from where the first one caught fire.
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Read More: Valley News – ‘Virtual pipeline’ of gas tankers in Vermont sparks concern