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?
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.
Did we ever learn what caused this?
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.
