I placate my fear

okay so like power distribution there are transmission lines that run on high pressure, and residential lines that run at low pressure. The step down is at the meter, which is installed at the point it changes from the gas company’s line to your line

though, entirely aside, the gas company will fix a problem on your side of the line unless it is within a dwelling or going to some fixture (gas lamps, backup generators and the like)

so all you need to do to steal gas is bypass the meter. Usually some combination of flexible and solid pipe is used, though you can go entirely flexible, which is what he did the last time. Because he’s not a gas company employee, he didn’t use properly rated pipe, which naturally leaked.

and here is where we reach the danger. His gas meter sits on his property line, some 60 ft from the house (though it’s five feet from his shed, which seems insane to me but moving on). If/when a spark meets natural gas at the ideal mixing threshold (somewhere between 30% and 70% nat gas to at least 5% oxygen) it reacts, which means that it burns, or more accurately explodes.

and if it only interacted with the gas in the air, we’d all be totally fine. Leaks don’t put that much out, even bad ones, and this is away from any structure with no place to collect. But sometimes the explosion backfeeds, if the stream is strong enough (and it is entirely invisible, so knowing entirely means either testing or learning the hard way), it can backfeed into the line, which connects to the mains

They made us watch videos about it when I worked inspecting pipeline, to really hammer home the importance of reporting leaks; a gas main explosion can take out an entire block of homes.

okay so now details I might have missed; technically the land the meter is on is considered “easement”, so it’s my land up until a utility technician needs to do something to it. This is being fixed, he’s having his service capped at the main line, and my meter is being moved up to up against my house.

stored though, that’s way upstream at refineries. I was taught the distribution system from the city gate to the customer. At the city gate it feeds in from a regional transmission line to a city transmission line, and that is where the “rotten egg” chemical is added. From transmission lines to service lines (residential and commercial), to point of use.

It’s actually a tremendously simple system, but the parts are distributed over miles and miles. Which, it occurs to me, is a slightly larger scale version of my security camera set up.