Some excitement yesterday as the construction crew hit our gas line.
The first I was aware of it was when firefighters knocked on the door to ask to check our basement. (It was okay.) This was a little bit after 4 PM.
Then Spire, the gas company, came. They bashed the sidewalk open with an excavator, then had to also tear a hole in the street.
Apparently the markings for the gas line had been wrong — the contractor said they’re supposed to go up the hill like they did with the water line. Since the markings for the gas main were on the sidewalk rather than the street where they made the connection, I suspect that might also have been incorrect. Perhaps there was an old inactive line. (He said in 26 years of business, this is the 5th time they’ve hit a gas line, and every time it was due to incorrect markings.)
The gas company has been upgrading everyones’ copper lines (which were only supposed to last 20 years!) to PE, but the wall contractor said they had something like 600,000 homes to do so it had been taking several years. So they took the opportunity to replace ours.
The sun set. They barely had any light to work with, a couple of headlamps and flashlights, but they kept going. I wound up going upstairs to read myself to sleep, but started hearing weird noises coming through the AC vents. Then the heater kicked in and I figured we’d gotten the OK to turn the furnace back on. Then there was a lot of clanging and banging and bright lights at the front (our bedroom windows are on the back of the house) as they started piling stuff back into the holes they’d dug, and covered over the big hole in the street with a metal plate.
Here’s the view this morning. Not shown: a UCIS pickup truck off to the right, presumably trying to figure out how they went wrong with the markings, or perhaps marking the location of the new line as if it isn’t really obvious now.
I really dislike those street plates. I know they’re great for a quick fix but they wind up sitting there for ages before being properly patched. But then, St. Louis county increasingly seems to be behind on road maintenance and has some really low-quality patch jobs on some major roads. There’s one section of Page that was freshly paved only a couple of years ago, but it has long stripes of deep potholes running uninterrupted through the entire length. So our street, which probably should have been resurfaced about 5 years ago, is probably going to have that stupid plate for quite a while.
One of the weird things about this is, nobody from the gas company came to talk to us until they were done. The only information I got was from the firefighters, and from the contractor when I went outside to look around and ask about stuff while the gas company was getting ready to tear up the sidewalk.