Lake Dallas neighbors say they hope a specially called city meeting provides more answers after a home explosion and fire there last week.
As Atmos Energy’s work upgrading natural gas lines continues, businesses say they’re feeling the impacts, too.
In just over eight years of running Beatitudes Tea Room, Alicia Christenson admits few have been like the past eight days in Lake Dallas.
A typical lunch crowd is just a few on Friday afternoon.
“Slow, extremely slow. Kind of scary,” Christensen said. “I think some folks think we’re closed because of everything that’s happened.”
Just outside her restaurant and retail shop on Market Street, near the water tower in the town of about 8,000 residents, orange meshed plastic fencing marked the areas of ongoing work from Atmos Energy crews, replacing natural gas lines citywide.
It comes after an explosion and fire just a few blocks from Lake Dallas’ city center on March 19 that leveled a home on Moseley Lane, and left a woman recovering in the ICU burn unit at Parkland Hospital.
The city of Lake Dallas said this week that the home had no gas connections.
Councilmember Randy Evans says he has the same information as his residents and the same questions.
“I think the number one right now is what caused it,” Evans said Friday.
While the investigation into the explosion remains active from the Lake Dallas Fire Department, Atmos and the Texas Railroad Commission, the energy provider told NBC-5 that crews have “performed safety surveys using mobile leak detection units across all of Lake Dallas.”
“Following those surveys, Atmos Energy found that the natural gas distribution system is functioning as expected,” Atmos said in a statement.
Evans hopes a specially called city council meeting next Wednesday at 6 p.m., one that Atmos officials are expected to attend, will provide an opportunity for the public to gain more insight and share their perspectives too.
“This whole thing was catastrophic,” Evans said. “Everybody has a story to tell, and they just want to talk about it. They want somebody to listen.”
Christensen says she hopes customers will hear the message, amid a lot of ongoing Atmos work and uncertainty following the explosion, that Lake Dallas is open for business.
“There’s not much other than pray and wait,” Christenson said.
