The owner of a well-known Vancouver café chain says he’s shocked and upset to learn the explosion that razed his downtown Vancouver shop was preventable, with BC Hydro having known about the catastrophic safety risk for years.
On Feb. 24, a buildup of combustible gas ignited inside an underground electrical vault beneath the historic Marine Building on Burrard Street, bursting through the JJ Bean’s sidewalk patio with flames up to four storeys high. The incident left two people with serious injuries, including burns and facial lacerations.
An independent investigation released Thursday found that not only was BC Hydro’s inadequate work procedure to blame, but the Crown corporation had identified the potentially deadly risk in an assessment of its vaults in 2016 and ignored a recommendation to replace the Burrard Street equipment by 2018.
“Fortunately no one was killed. If someone was sitting on my patio and my staff had been serving people, that would have been devastating,” JJ Bean Coffee Roasters CEO John Neate said. “I thought this was an accident, but this was obviously not an accident, it was something that could have been prevented.”
The JJ Bean on Burrard Street and the Tractor Foods, both of which are in the Marine Building, have been closed for repairs ever since.
At a press conference this week, BC Hydro’s CEO took full responsibility for the disaster, apologized to those hurt and vowed immediate action. He said he had never been more “disappointed” in over 30 years of working at the utility provider than he was sharing the findings on Thursday.
“This incident should never have happened,” Chris O’Riley said. “We should have caught this much earlier and we didn’t.
“Every year, we make substantial investments in maintaining and upgrading our equipment and every day we make decisions to keep the public and our employees safe. As challenging as it is, we must get each decision right and that did not happen here.”
The third-party review conducted by Senez Consulting Ltd. found that BC Hydro had “limited guidance” in place for required visual inspections, “no defined replacement parts for the vaults” and no “end-of-life timing” for the gaskets inside them.
As a result, the Burrard Street vault contained “incompatible materials,” with field crews left to find “insufficient” gasket repair solutions on their own. Those incompatible materials contributed to the explosion, it said, while a stronger monitoring program might have identified other equipment issues sooner.
The consultant found that BC Hydro’s oil-testing program was “not updated to reflect changes in standards,” and was limited in its controls and tracking.
Most upsetting to Neate, however, was its discovery that a 2016 assessment performed by BC Hydro found that 14 underground vaults — including the one on Burrard Street — were at risk of causing severe injury or death if not property maintained or replaced. The assessment recommended the Burrard Street vault be replaced in 2018.
According to O’Riley, the Burrard Street vault was removed from a subsequent system improvement project so that a nearby vault in Gastown could be upgraded instead. BC Hydro intended to do maintenance work on the Burrard Street vault, but that never happened.
“Our crews had difficulties performing the maintenance, despite their best efforts, because they did not have the proper information and instructions or the correct materials to complete the maintenance work,” he told reporters.
Energy and Mines Minister Josie Osborne said Friday she will be meeting with BC Hydro’s CEO, while Premier David Eby said the province takes the report’s findings “profoundly seriously.”
“To have BC Hydro infrastructure fail in such a spectacular way that causes risk to public safety is profoundly disturbing to me and I know it is to BC Hydro,” he said an an unrelated news conference.
“The minister is reviewing the report and certainly I’m glad to hear that the report addresses other areas where this fault may exist, and that BC Hydro is taking the measures to ensure they’re safe and communities are safe. The minister is also looking to see if there’s anything else we can do to learn from this and make sure that the public is safe.”
Neate said he received a letter from BC Hydro on Thursday reaffirming its cooperation with the insurance process, which he appreciated. While the first priority should be ensuring that such a disaster never happens again, he said he would also like to see more accountability from BC Hydro.
“I’d love to find out what the reporting structure is there and why things got slipped through the cracks on something so important that could have cause a number of deaths,” he said.
“I’d love for them to say, ‘We’ll cover all the costs,'” he added.
Neate said the toll on his business remains to be calculated — more than four months of closure, lost staff wages, the cost of repairs, and more. Even when the shop reopens, he said he doesn’t know if all the customers will return. The Burrard Street shop was the busiest in Vancouver, generating $8,000 a day in sales.
“They’re a Crown corporation, we don’t have a choice of going with anybody else, we have to use BC Hydro, so they have a higher calling to do things right by businesses,” Neate said.
In a written statement, BC Hydro said it’s continuing to work with affected businesses and their insurers through their claims process.
“We are here to make that process as easy for them as we can. We have settled with two of the businesses and we are waiting for the others to complete restoration work and understand the full scope of their claims before we compensate them,” wrote Kyle Donaldson of BC Hydro’s media relations team.
“When the insurance claim and documentation is submitted we’ll work with their insurer. We are in regular contact with the administrative manager for JJ Bean and are committed to compensating them.”
The utility provider did not address business concerns about insurance premiums increasing in the aftermath of the disaster or ensuring there is no financial liability for impacted businesses. It did not answer or whether any employees were reprimanded, suspended or fired in connection with the incident.
In March, BC Hydro decommissioned what it said were the only two similar electrical vaults in the province. One was on Gilford Street near Henshaw Lane in Vancouver’s West End, and on Keefer Street between Gore and Jackson avenues. All 14 underground vaults with oil-filled equipment that were identified as risks in the 2016 assessment have now been decommissioned as well.
BC Hydro said it is now conducting an internal review of “everything that transpired since the assessment was made in 2016,” which could result in other actions taken by the utility. A separate program review of other distribution street vault equipment involving a third-party expect is underway as well.