Just days after the 400-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Canton marked the congregation’s first service in its shiny new facility last March, the flush of a neighbor’s toilet set off an explosion — and months later, $800,000 in liens.
It was a flush that rattled the sleepy stretch of Lawton Road, triggered by a spark from the neighbor’s electric water pump.
Unbeknownst to the congregation and the neighbor, 500,000 cubic feet of propane was lurking below the earth. Although the site has been effectively remediated and repaired, the church is now smothered in liens and mired in the middle of a blame game.
The question of who and what caused the initial propane leak remains unanswered. An investigation found that the propane leak was caused by a hole in the underground plastic piping.
While the Canton fire marshal determined that the rupture was most likely construction-related, nothing has been proven conclusively. And the contractors and companies involved with the work last spring are capitalizing on that uncertainty, pointing fingers as far away from themselves as possible.
The church worked with the state Department of Environmental Protection and Earth Technology II, an environmental remediation company out of Wallingford, to rid the area of the propane fire starter. Within months, the DEP was satisfied the danger was gone.
“The good news is that the propane has been cleaned up and monitored,” said attorney Robert Joyce, counsel for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and an attorney with Littleton, Joyce, Ughetta, Park & Kelly LLP in New York’s Westchester County.
The bad news is that “there are other sorts of thorny issues to address,” said Joyce, referring to determination of who will pay for the damage and remediation.
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Who Will Pay?
One thing all parties can agree on is the fact that this unfortunate occurrence was an accident. No one wanted it to happen, but no one wants to foot the bill, either.
Initially, the fault appeared to lay with Superior Energy, the company that supplied the propane and ran the compromised line. The DEP asked Superior Energy to take responsibility for the investigation and remediation costs, and they agreed, Joyce said.
But several days later, the offending hole in the propane line was detected, and it appeared that construction was to blame. The Canton fire marshal agreed, stating that construction work was most likely the cause of the hole. With that news, Superior Energy retracted its concession.
Attorney James Alissi, of Cramer, Alissi & Fontaine in Hartford, counsel for Superior Energy, said, “My clients and I are confident that at the end of the day, we will be completely vindicated.”
But C.S. Margison, the main contractor on the site, firmly disagrees.
“It hasn’t been proven to anybody [that contractors were to blame],” said company President Douglas Margison, who asserted that his company was not the sole contractor working on the property. Several other subcontractors also worked on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and any one of them could also have caused the damage, he maintains.
Margison’s refusal to accept responsibility for the situation “basically left the LDS [Latter Day Saints] church holding the bag as the property owner,” Joyce said. With both the propane provider and the construction company shrugging off blame, the church was forced to shoulder the cost of the remediation.
As a result, the church is withholding certain payments.
“There are a lot of people who haven’t been paid on this project,” Margison said. His company is one of them.
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Liens Pile Up
In response, Margison has slapped a $160,641 mechanics lien on the property. Earth Technology II, who could not be reached for comment, has stacked a $547, 970 lien on top of that.
The insurance companies currently ironing out the issues have already paid some of the remediation costs to Earth Technology, Joyce said, and the amount still to be paid has yet to be determined.
As for Margison, Joyce said that the contractor has not lived up to his end of the deal. “Margison has not formally accepted our tender of indemnification under the contract,” Joyce said. “He may have recourse or claims against others who were working on the site.” But not against the church.
So far, negotiations have plodded along informally, and Joyce remains optimistic that they will stay out of court.
“From the church’s perspective, we would love to see things move quicker,” he added.
But the church has moved back into its new facility and has held regular activities in it for months now.
“We’re moving right ahead,” said Justin Johnson, bishop of one of the church’s wards. “The one thing, now that it’s getting a little colder … we have not got the heat turned back on in the building.”
But a few chilly baptisms and extra-bundled church-goers have been bearable, and repair work is scheduled for the coming weeks to bring new heat — from a new provider — to the property.
“Right now, it’s in the insurance companies’ hands,” Margison said. “The insurance companies will have to answer that question as to who’s going to pay.”
