Widower sues over fatal Utah gas blast

Questar Gas and Qwest Communications were sued Tuesday by the husband of a woman killed in a natural gas explosion in Saratoga Springs in February.

According to the lawsuit filed by Greg Roper in 3rd District Court, Questar, Qwest and three companies contracted by Qwest inadvertently caused the explosion that leveled Roper's home and killed his wife, April, and Larry Radford, a Questar employee.

The Feb. 6 explosion was caused by negligence and a failure to safely respond to a natural gas leak that pumped more than 9,000 cubic feet of gas into the ground near the Ropers' home, the lawsuit states.

But the first mistake was caused by S&E Cable, a company contracted by Qwest to install phone lines in the frozen ground in the Ropers' neighborhood. The company, which did not have a contractor's license at the time of the explosion, initially burst the Questar line that led to the Ropers' home, according to the lawsuit.

"(S&E Cable) didn't have a license to do what they were doing at all," said Greg Roper's attorney, Colin King.

S&E Cable delayed notifying Questar, King says, which allowed the gas to saturate the ground surrounding the Ropers' home for about two hours before Questar arrived. The company did not create a hole in the ground to vent the leaking gas, King said, so it stayed in the ground near the Ropers' home.

S&E Cable could not immediately be reached for comment by the Deseret Morning News on Tuesday.

By the time April Roper and Radford were given the all-clear to enter the Roper home on 682 N. Badger Lane to turn on the furnace, which April had turned off before she evacuated her home 1 1/2 hours earlier, the air in the Roper family's basement was between 8 percent and 10 percent natural gas, the lawsuit states.

Once in the basement, Radford, who brought Roper to show him where the gas appliances were, would have recognized the highly flammable conditions, the lawsuit says, except he only had one piece of equipment with him to measure the natural gas levels. The piece of equipment he had with him was not designed to detect explosive levels, King says.

Evidence gathered from the explosion shows that Radford's gas detector was switched on, as was the furnace. Radford and April were found dead in the basement five hours after the 4 p.m. explosion.