I wouldn’t want to be nearby, but yeah, I can see this happening.

Of course, that story had legs being a big one, but many of these explosion stories tend to blink out of existence or have a short life span. The public utilities do a heck of a lot of advertising some in the form of infomercials showing folks how to save energy and so forth. This means their ads can be a kind of gravy train for some media outlets of any kind. Some might think, by and large, do these utility companies really need so much publicity? Surely those shows aren’t going on tv and brag over a map of the USA pointing out, “Hey!, look at this map of how many gas leak explosions we found last week”. No, I don’t think that’s the publicity they want to project. Rather better to get involved on local tv and polish their public image by getting involved in community projects, etc. It’s a better look. 👀

A big story that went national in 2020 I believe if memory serves, was a Boston suburb where about 20 +/- residences blew up with varying degrees of damage, apparently due to a faulty read or operation of pressure on some last mileage gas line hookup, (relatively newly installed hardware?) pressure built up and started whacking residential units on that line. For how much damage those explosions did, I think that story didn’t last long, and yeah, the pressure point/value/operation had to be fixed, plus I’m sure that the victims got some kind of settlement. Also, don’t know the details on residential gas hookups but I have to wonder if there was a shutoff safety valve at the customer point for too much pressure received? Utility meters of many types in cities are designed for reading from the streets, as in water, gas, electric whatever makes the billing process cheaper and more expedient, that is many old meters that required physical reading have now been replaced. Whatever happened in that Boston suburb, I hope they didn’t blow up due to it being all about the money honey.

There’s a reason residential gas is doped with a noticeable perfume.