Last month, the fire marshal's office determined that the July 31 blast was caused by a natural gas leak that came from an exterior line serving a complex that houses primarily international students and their families.
Investigators could not determine what ignited the gas but said the fire was accidental.
The explosion killed Lamiya Zahin, the 4-year-old daughter of A&M doctoral student Saquib Ejaz, as well as his 62-year-old mother, Rabeya Chaudhury.
It seriously injured Ejaz's pregnant wife, Lufthansa Kanta, and his father, Ejaz Chaudhury, 69.
Before the apartment blast, state officials didn't require inspections of gas pipes at prisons, university dormitories or other state housing facilities, said Wayne Smith, the agency's director of fire safety inspections. The facilities house about 300,000 people.
``It wasn't on our radar,'' he told the Bryan-College Station Eagle for its Sunday editions. ``This is a very tragic event. As sad as it is, fire safety results from a reaction to a tragic event.''
The Fire Marshal's Office and the Railroad Commission are working to develop a way to test gas pipes inside and outside of buildings maintained by state agencies, Smith said.
Although the plan isn't final yet, some suggestions include requiring inspections every two or five years, depending on the age of a building's gas pipes, he said.
Smith said officials want the new requirements in place by the end of the year. The cost to conduct such inspections wasn't immediately known.
The new guidelines would apply to 49 college campuses, 24 mental facilities, 15 juvenile detention centers and 105 prisons, Smith said.
Texas A&M President Robert Gates said the university will have its own procedures in place to test gas lines at campus buildings in addition to any state-mandated inspections.
A&M had not routinely tested its gas lines before the blast, said Chris Meyer, director of the university's Environmental Health & Safety Department. State officials would not speculate on whether inspections would have caught the leak.
``After what we've been through, we've established a pretty low tolerance for gas leaks,'' Meyer said. ``If there's a leak, we roll in the fire trucks. We're not asking any questions. We can't afford for anything like this to happen again. Never.''
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