75 Vendors, 40,000 Gallons, Zero Propane Incidents: How a Chicago Family Propane Company Ran Lollapalooza

The Situation

The Facts

Lollapalooza ended Sunday night. Monday morning, Dominic Gulli wrote a letter to Captain Paul Lea of the Chicago Fire Prevention Bureau. One number sat at the center of it.

Zero.

Zero propane incidents — across what Gulli's letter described as two and a half square miles of festival operations, and across 75 food vendors who, by Gulli's count in his letter to the bureau, hauled in more than 500 gas cooking appliances and burned through 40,000 gallons of LP in a week.

Gulli is owner and director of operations at K.E.P. Propane and Equipment LLC. The Chicago company supplies the fuel, installs and leak-checks the vapor systems, and monitors the cooking operation at the city's biggest festivals. Lollapalooza is the largest of them. The event sold out this year, per Chicago Tribune reporting, at a daily capacity of 115,000 people inside the fences.

Festival work is the hardest version of the propane job, and every operator who has ever set up a fairgrounds knows why. The systems are temporary. Much of the equipment belongs to somebody else and arrived in the back of a van that morning. The customer is a line cook you met at seven a.m. who has a queue forming and no interest in waiting. And a crowd the size of a midsize city stands three feet from all of it, for four straight days, in the rain.

To hold that together on the Grant Park festival grounds, K.E.P. put out more than 12,000 linear feet of high-pressure LP hose and made more than 2,000 connections. Every one of the 75 vapor systems was leak-checked before cooking — a cold-start system gets one whether anybody is watching or not, because the code mandates it — and Gulli's crew held each system under pressure for a minimum of three minutes, the standard he cited to the bureau.

From one station wagon to the whole lakefront

The company's roots run back to a hot July day in 1980, when a Chicago official called a fixture showroom on the phone looking for an equipment mechanic who could help with a new idea of restaurateur Arnie Morton's called the Taste of Chicago. The showroom manager handed the phone to Rich W. Kafka, who was there repairing equipment. Kafka drove his station wagon to Michigan Avenue, found a row of restaurant kitchens that needed converting from natural gas to propane, and stayed on site the whole day to make sure nothing quit. They asked him back the next year, and every year after that.

That history is told on K.E.P.'s own site, and it explains the company's tagline — "Keeping everyone protected" — better than any brochure could. Gulli entered the story in 2007, when he was dating Kafka's daughter, Dominique, and gave up weekends from his construction job to help repair vendor gas equipment at a Taste that had grown to more than 100 food vendors over ten days. Kafka taught him the trade the way his own father had taught him.

In 2016, the two men turned 36 years of relationships into a company. They took coursework through the Illinois Propane Gas Association, insured the operation, bought the material, partnered with a local propane supplier, and bid the Taste of Chicago as a propane service rather than an equipment repair shop. They installed every vendor-supplied appliance on time that year. Two more festivals called before the season was out.

Ten years on, K.E.P. is at Sueños over Memorial Day weekend, at Windy City Smokeout, and at Lollapalooza — a family company, still, working the same lakefront.

The part that leaves a record

What has changed is what the company can prove afterward. By Gulli’s account, every leak check at Lollapalooza was documented in the Tank Spotter app (tankspotter.com), which time-stamped each test and recorded the exact GPS coordinates of every propane tank across the grounds. When the Fire Prevention Bureau or C3 Presents, the festival's producer, wanted to know the status of a particular vendor's system, the record was on a phone and shareable on the spot. By Gulli's account, the fire officials he worked with had not seen leak-check documentation like it before.

*Disclosure: Bill Stomp, editor of Propane Insider, founded Tank Spotter. Gulli is a customer and authorized the use of his emails and reported remarks here.*

Nobody was taking a contractor's word for any of it. The bureau had roughly 20 personnel walking the event full time, checking the food vendors' installations booth by booth, Gulli says. Four days of that scrutiny, on a packed, fast-moving festival site, and on the propane side there was nothing to flag. No leak. No incident. Zero.

"I am honored to partner with the bureau to help keep the staff and attendees safe at all of Chicago's large scale music and food festivals," Gulli wrote in his letter to Captain Lea. "Because of our partnership, there were many life safety hazards that were mitigated behind the scenes."

Gulli has said so directly. By his own account, he recommends the app to everyone he meets. In an email to Tank Spotter founder Bill Stomp in May, under the subject line "1 million thank yous," he wrote: "You and your team have been absolutely amazing. I have recommended tank spotter to many propane companies across Illinois." He offered festival credentials as thanks, and said he'd like to shake Stomp's hand in person.

What summer runs on

This is the season the industry rarely gets credit for. County fairs in Ohio. Rib fests in Kansas. Church picnics, taco festivals, Fourth of July midways, food-truck rallies in parking lots from Sacramento to Savannah. American propane — clean, portable, and available by the cylinder or the bobtail load — is what fires nearly all of it, and it works precisely to the degree that nobody at the funnel-cake stand ever thinks about it.

There are more festivals on the Chicago calendar before the weather turns. K.E.P.'s trucks will roll into the park before the gates open, the hose will go down, the systems will get tested and logged, and a crowd will eat lunch without a clue any of it happened. Done right, that is what it looks like.

Operators running festival or event work who want the same time-stamped, GPS-logged leak-check records can see how K.E.P. does it at tankspotter.com.