Loretta Cook was fast asleep at her in-laws’ house in South Carolina when her cellphone rang at 1 a.m.
In a daze, she answered the phone and was told an electrical fire had destroyed her Willowbrook home.
Her heart racing, Cook called US Airways and by 5 a.m. she and her husband boarded a flight back to Chicago. They pulled in front of the charred remains of their home four hours later.
“From the street it looked like the windows had been boarded over,” Cook said. “Then they opened the front door for us.”
It was almost too much to bear. The interior, almost unidentifiable, was unsafe to walk through.
“The house was condemned,” Cook said, recalling Feb. 27, 2010. “My husband took pictures through the window.”
More than a year and a half later, Cook still can’t look at the photos, but she can’t escape the memory.
A bright yellow pipe in her yard serves as a daily reminder.
It took Cook and her husband more than a year to rebuild their house, which a wrecking crew had demolished to the foundation.
The family moved in March 1. Nine days later, Nicor attached the gas meter to the house. Cook said the crew left the yellow gas pipe unburied, running along about four feet of the couple’s then frozen, mud-caked yard.
Cook said a Nicor employee knocked on her door that day and told her the ground was too hard to bury the line, but that crews would do so in about a week when the ground was expected to thaw.
That sounded fine to her.
At the time, Willowbrook had issued the couple a temporary occupancy permit, allowing them to live in the house until June 30. To get permanent permission, the Cooks would have to landscape their property.
Loretta Cook said that based on the Nicor employee’s promise March 10, she had no concerns the gas line would be buried before the landscaping was completed, saving crews from having to uproot freshly laid sod.
As she went about the task of buying new furniture, Cook said she forgot to call Nicor about the exposed line until late April, when she realized the house needed a larger meter.
She said she called Nicor several times after that and asked for the line to be buried, but it never happened.
In mid-June, she began compiling a list of Nicor employees she had spoken to. As the list grew longer, Cook became increasingly frustrated.
The couple landscaped their lawn with the yellow gas line still exposed. On July 5, Cook called Nicor again and was told there were no appointments available for July, she said.
Fed up, she emailed What’s Your Problem?
“I’ve given up any hope that anyone from Nicor will call me about burying the line until I have a gas leak (or worse),” she wrote.
Her biggest fear, she said later, was that someone would accidentally hit the exposed pipe and spark a fire, causing her house to burn yet again.
“Exposed gas lines kind of unnerve me,” she said. “One fire was enough, thank you very much.”
The Problem Solver called Nicor spokesman Richard Caragol last week.
He called back several days later with a different version of events.
Caragol said there is nothing in Nicor’s system to indicate the line was unburied March 10.
“It clearly says ‘job complete,'” Caragol said of the technician’s report from the visit. Had the technician left an unexposed gas line, he would noted it, Caragol said.
“That would be a large safety procedure issue,” he said.
Caragol said Nicor did not know the line was unburied until Cook called on April 27. He said a Nicor crew that responded May 19 to install the larger meter determined the line had been exposed by a third party sometime after the original visit March 10 — most likely by a contractor installing the drainage system.
He said Nicor personnel on May 19 determined the line, though exposed, did not pose an imminent safety threat, so it did not need to be buried immediately.
Still, after the Problem Solver first called Caragol last week, Nicor responded quickly.
On Tuesday, a crew from the Joint Utility Locating Information for Excavators, or JULIE, visited Cook’s house to mark existing utility lines for digging. Caragol said the elapsed time from April 27 until this week was a typical time frame for such projects.
Cook insisted Caragol’s version of events was wrong, and that Nicor knew about the exposed line since March 10, when the Nicor employee promised to return and bury it, she said.
“I just took them at their word,” Cook said.
Now that work is progressing, Cook said she won’t quibble.
“They’re trenching my front yard,” she said by phone Wednesday afternoon. “I feel bad that it’s the hottest day of the year, but they’re here.”
Cook said they completed the job in about two hours and did great work.
A short time after Cook called, Caragol called with an update.
“There was certainly third-party damage to the line,” he said. “We never received a call that someone struck the line, so that is a concern.”
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