Mastic fire chief hailed as gas leak hero

Give Mastic Fire Department Chief Dwight Blankenship a house fire to fight any day. At least fire is an enemy that can be seen - unlike gas, usually invisible and deadly.

So when Blankenship, 37, pulled up to 999 Montauk Hwy. in Shirley early Saturday morning to investigate a gas leak call, he was dismayed to see a huge, dense propane gas cloud hovering over a parking lot near a Kohl's department store. It was being fed by a geyser of leaking gas shooting propane 10 feet into the air.

A half-full propane truck sat near the leaking 30,000- gallon underground tank, abandoned after its driver discovered the leak.

More: newsday.com/mastic
On Twitter: Follow LI Towns on Twitter

It was not the quiet, peaceful New Year's morning that Blankenship had hoped for.

Shortly after 1 a.m., Blankenship and his wife had just started watching television after putting their four young children to bed when the pager sounded with news of the leak.

Blankenship, first at the scene with Assistant Chief Jim Mickert, was shocked by what they encountered.

"I could see the cloud covering the whole back parking lot of the Kohl's shopping center," Blankenship said Monday. "I could see it actually geysering out of the ground."

Fearing any spark could ignite the gas, the two threw their cell phones in their trucks and turned off their lights.

"It could have been anything that set it off at this point," he said.

They began calling fire marshals, hazmat teams, and surrounding fire departments for assistance. Blankenship made the call to LIPA to shut off the electricity to the area, and to halt traffic and evacuate nearby homes with the help of Suffolk police.

"If it gets into somebody's basement, it gets to their oil burner. Now their oil burner fires off because it's cold out, and I'm looking at multiple houses probably going," Blankenship said. "It could have been anything of the sort at that point in time."

Fire crews pumped water onto the leak, in an attempt to stanch the flow with ice. Dozens of fire departments responded with ambulances and trucks. The owner of nearby Bay Gas Service offered Blankenship technical advice.

About 3 p.m. on Saturday, Industrial Propane and Reclamation of Sussex, N.J., finally stopped the leak after locating a problematic valve on the tank.

Blankenship would end up working for more than 24 hours at the scene.

On Sunday, the Brookhaven Town Fire Chief's Council said that it would award Blankenship, who works in law enforcement, a plaque for his actions.

"If anything, I'm going to accept that on behalf of my department and my men," said Blankenship, whose father was also a member of the department.

"Because it's not a single effort. I may have been there calling the shots, but I still had guys underneath me taking care of business and doing the grunt work."Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy yesterdayMonday praised the actions of Blankenship and other first responders.

"You hope that that big event never becomes reality, but when it does, it's comforting knowing we have these highly trained individuals such as Chief Blankenship and the hundreds of others that were up at 1 in the morning to protect public safety," Levy said.