De Dommel Water Board has started an investigation into the threat of a gas leak that occurred in March close to the A2 near the High Tech Campus. Highway A2 was partly closed, and there was considerable traffic chaos in and around the city.
The threat arose due to subsidence of the ground, causing the gas pipe to hang in a vacuum and therefore threatening to burst. Due to the dangerous situation, the A2 was closed between Leenderheide and De Hogt junctions. Residents in an adjacent residential area in Waalre were asked to stay indoors via an NL-Alert message, and about 500 cubic metres of gas had to be flared to empty the pipe.
Complications
In the end, everything fizzled out. Nevertheless, the De Dommel Water Board has started investigating how the situation could arise. “Samples have been taken from the ground, and we are now trying to map out how the subsidence occurred. Was there a vibration in the ground? To what extent did the work on-site influence what happened? We want answers to those questions, but that is a quite complicated process.”
The water board divulges, “We hope the results will be out before the summer as it is difficult to gauge how long the investigation could take “.
