Why Do We Need This Bill?
Desire and Rationale for the Passage of this Bill
Since the training and licensing of people working with combustible fuels for pay is voluntary in New Hampshire, home owners (or tenants) have little or no assurance about the safety and quality of work done by workers hired by their builders and contractors. While homeowners can check contractor’s credentials, licenses, reputation and experience, once the contractor starts the job, there is no legal requirement for the contractor to hire properly trained people to work with explosive gas systems.
Certainly, people will always make mistakes, however, when it concerns explosive fuels, proper training is critical and must be made mandatory. Our tragedy was a result of the subcontractor’s ignorance of basic procedures for installing a safe system. While, fortunately, tragedies such as ours are rare, changing the current licensing law from optional to mandatory and making it against the law for contractors to use untrained workers on our homes’ heating fuel systems would be a major step forward in the protection of New Hampshire families from hazardous and potentially life threatening work.
If it would have been illegal for the contractor to employ unlicensed gas contractors to work on our propane fuel system, perhaps our contractor wouldn’t have broken such a law and Amilia would be alive today. We need to make sure that people that are hired to work on gas systems know what they are doing. We hope that this bill can be referred to as Amilia’s Law; it would mean a lot to our family and the passage of this bill would allow some good to come out of our tragic loss.
Please read the letter from the Luhrmann Family (March 23, 2006).