I don't think it was "out of nowhere" considering there's an alarm going off, and the fire department is out there. Looks like a gas leak that probably hit a pilot light.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Catastrophic Failure
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A catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure from which recovery is impossible. Catastrophic failures often lead to cascading systems failure. The term is most commonly used for structural failures, but has often been extended to many other disciplines in which total and irrecoverable loss occurs, such as a head crash occurrence on a hard disk drive. Such failures are investigated using the methods of forensic engineering, which aims to isolate the cause or causes of failure. (Wikipedia)
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The alarms sound like the ones that are on firefighters clothes and go off if they're stationary for a bit.
This is a thing? I never knew that
Moves "replace my gas appliances with electric ones" a few notches higher on the ol' to-do list
Was this the one in texas, or in plum PA? Or a different one. As the gas infrastructure ages we are getting more and more of this. I mean, it's only a couple over the past few years vs the 100s of thousands of houses with gas lines, so it's still relatively rare.
Good thing the fire department was nearby.
Seriously though, gas leak or something that they were already looking for?
I cannot speak for this situation but I can offer some insight into the systems responsible. One of my firm's specializations is data integrity and optimization, and one of our clients is a utilities company. The system we managebis supposed to detect, report, and shutdown any gas meter with anomalous behavior, then dispatch a crew to investigate. The SLA (maximum allowed time before penalties are incurred) from anomaly to shutdown is two minutes. We have it down to under thirty seconds.
If this was an accidental gas leak severe enough to prompt for a crew dispatch, then the meter should have been shut down long before there was enough lost gas to blow up a house.
PS: Propane tank fueled furnace in the basement is bad, mmmmkay.
Interesting. How do you differentiate between someone turning on a stove on high for 15 minutes, vs a burst pipe?
I'm not a professional or an expert but I know that even when you turn it up to full it's not releasing as much gas as it would if you just opened it up and let it go freely from the pipe. No matter what you have it plugged into, your gas line is being pressure regulated.
Ah good point.
We focus on making sure that the data in ingested and processed in a timely manner. The logic is internal to the app so I don't have visibility into that but I know the meters also monitor other metrics like line pressure.
That isn't going to make me paranoid AF. /s
Did we ever learn what caused this?
Poorly planned and performed utility maintenance caused a gas leak and thus explosion. That’s usually the backstory behind gas leak explosions these days.
A natural gas service line was damaged during work, and just thirty minutes later the home exploded on Tuesday, Dec. 13, an investigation by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) revealed.
I didn't read the title and wow. Boom.
Call before you dig
Now you're cooking with gas!