NTSB Board Meeting for Investigation of Silver Spring Maryland Apartment Building Explosion

[@keithpedersen3653]

Kudos to the NTSB for posting these on KZbin for permanent hosting. The old, in-house hosting was terrible. One critique; can we edit out the lunch breaks?

[@AEP817]

Or at least if they put the link in the video description for skipping through the lunch break if they don’t edit the video (law may not allow it).

[@othername1000]

@@AEP817for a lot of KZbin vids u gotta check the comments

[@gunner24331]

I feel like this panel of investigators is pretty subpar compared to the other hearings the NTSB has posted. Way too many “I don’t know, I’m not aware, I’m not sure” type answers. How about a requiring a common key or tool to allow access to all meter rooms?

[@othername1000]

It's interesting that a private person is expected to notify more people than professional firefighters and dispatchers are expected to notify. You'd kind of hope that the professionals would be held to a higher standard, and be required to notify the gas company. The gas company has the better technology and experience to properly detect , trace, and stop leakages. Within the past couple months, I smelled gas in a larger building, and called METCAD. The fire department responded, they too could smell the gas but with their equipment were not able to get a reading. In this case however, METCAD and Fire did notify the gas company. Gas company showed up and found a significant leak where contractors had connected to run a flexible line up a chimney. This was on a Friday evening, that thing could have leaked all weekend. Even though the FD couldn't get it to show up on their instruments.

[@BienvenidoEspinal]

Service regulators are required to be inspected every 20 years. When was the last time Washington Gas inspected this regulator? Was the inspector trained and qualified to identify that this was a Mercury regulator?

[@jefflewis4]

Did they determine why the locks to the meter room were changed ?? Locks are not usually changed on a whim. They must have had a compelling reason to do so. Perhaps people outside the maintenance staff previously had access to that room ?

[@jaysmith1408]

Speaking for our fire department and those surrounding ours with which we work, if we are called for a gas leak, and we need access to a service room, we are getting in. We are not requiring knox boxes, many do, but if a keyholder is not found, or else has an extended ETA (usually over ten or twenty minutes) we’re popping the door. I cannot recall thinking of getting a corner open, we’re getting completely in. It’s not a request. I am typing this as i listen, so answering Rachel’s comment, if we have a reasonable belief of an incident of any scale (a gas call, needing access to the utility room is more than reasonable) we have every right to completely break down the door (in practice just forcing through the lock).

[@dks13827]

That could cause a spark.

[@jaysmith1408]

dks13827 would have to be metal to metal, and if i’m not mistaken (i’m not listening to the whole thing again to make sure) they said originally the gas mixture was too rich to explode. Makes sense, understood, but for a what-if behind that door, it’s always worth picking the mystery box over an inaccurate result.

[@othername1000]

Lunch break ends and the meeting resumes at 1:38:47

[@AEP817]

^The hero we needed. Not all wear capes.

[@matthewperez9962]

Very