Unsightly gas line excavations irk local residents
Some renovations have taken months
Esser Avenue resident Laurie Domiano likes to think of herself as a patient person.
She realizes that replacing old natural gas pipes can’t be accomplished overnight.
But Domiano can’t understand why the front of her home still looks deplorable more than eight months after National Fuel dug up her lawn as part of a new meter installation blitz.
“It looks like a grave in front of my house,” she lamented. “There’s also broken cement, and a couple kids even fell off their bikes.”
Domiano said she stumbled into holes as she tried to plant flowers and had to rake stones out of her grass so she could mow her lawn.
A Tacoma Avenue man who lives three miles from Domiano shares her frustration. William Terrance said he waited more than a year for National Fuel to finish work on his property. The last phases are being completed, and Terrance isn’t thrilled with the final product.
In the year leading up to the completion, Terrance said residents were never given straight answers when they called the utility.
“They just jerked you along. We felt powerless,” he said. “We argued. We screamed. We tried to be nice. It leaves a really bad taste in your mouth.”
Adding insult to injury, Terrance said, a relative who lives in East Amherst saw National Fuel crews complete the same type of project in about nine days.
“There’s a pecking order, I don’t care what anybody says,” Terrance grumbled. “The city is always last — unless you live on Middlesex.”
Residents on Homer Avenue in North Buffalo, Hunt Avenue in Riverside and numerous East Side streets that include Paderewski Drive and Koons Avenue have also contacted City Hall to complain about unsightly excavation projects that they think are dragging on for too long.
Norm Matuszewski, of Homer Avenue, said the work on his street started last summer, and many of the lawns still look “atrocious.” He thinks crews used shoddy seeding methods.
“They should knock money off our gas bill or something,” he said.
Julie Coppola Cox, a National Fuel spokeswoman, insisted there’s no geographic “pecking order” to how quickly work is completed. If projects in Buffalo take longer, she said it’s often because the underground pipes are older than the infrastructure in most suburbs. The older the pipes, the more extensive the work.
“We realize excavating can be a messy process. We do it as quickly as we can,” said Coppola Cox.
Some excavations are done in the autumn, she added, while restoration work can’t be completed until spring. Still, residents said the weather can’t be blamed for projects that have dragged on for eight to 18 months.
A glut of complaints spurred North Council Member Joseph Golombek Jr. to call for answers from utility officials. Golombek said he shares Terrance’s suspicions that National Fuel is more inclined to fast-track projects in higher-income suburban neighborhoods than in the city. If the delays aren’t caused by geographic favoritism, then the only other answer is “ineptitude,” Golombek insisted.
“They’ve been telling us for months and months that the work will get done,” he said.
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