Response to gas leak prompts concern in Colorado neighborhood
Inside his Colorado home, Charles, or "Chick" Rappa relies heavily on his oxygen to breathe. Outside he tries to take in the fresh air, something that he says is increasingly harder to do.
"You can smell it right now, it's coming, do you smell it now?" Rappa asked CBS Colorado reporter Karen Morfitt in the middle of their interview in Littleton.
"Yeah, definitely," she responded.
"It's coming out pretty bad," he added.
The smell is the odor of natural gas. He noticed it weeks ago, and then his son noticed it as well.
"He says 'Dad!' I said, 'I know about it. I tried calling a couple of times.' You get tired of waiting," Rappa said.
They claim it took weeks before anyone came to investigate after one of Rappa's neighbors Alexa reported the smell as well.
"I first noticed it about a week ago. I smelled it for the first time by my porch and also in my driveway. That's when I called it in," she said.
That's when they say they first saw Xcel Energy in the area.
"What did they say when they got here, what did they find?" Morfitt asked.
"'We have a gas leak.' I said, 'Yeah, I know, you can smell it from over there, over here.' He says 'Well, don't worry it's not drifting toward your house,'" Rappa said.
"They said it was in the street and they were working to determine if it was being routed into anyone's house but I'm not sure where that ended up," Alexa said.
CBS Colorado reached out to Xcel Energy to ask about the response and why the discovery wasn't immediately fixed. In an email, a spokesperson for the utility wrote, "This leak has a very small migration pattern with no immediate threat to migrate to buildings. According to regulation, this type of leak is recognized as being non-hazardous at the time of detection, but justifies scheduled repair, which must be completed within 12 months from when the leak was reported."
"It seems weird that I would be smelling it so close to my house and it is not an emergency," Alexa said.
"When you purposefully don't do anything, you know that's pretty bad," Rappa said.
According to Xcel, repairs are set to happen this week and anticipate they will be complete by the end of the week if not sooner.