Hey, there! Log in / Register
Where the natural-gas leaks are
By adamg on Sat, 08/22/2015 - 1:04pm
The Home Energy Efficiency Team used data from National Grid and Eversource to create maps of unplugged natural-gas leaks in eastern Massachusetts (1,837 in Boston).
Via Inside Medford.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
From the HEET website:
"Although utilities must repair any leak considered potentially explosive, they do not have to repair a leak judged nonexplosive– no matter how big that leak is.
Since the utilities don’t have to pay the cost of the wasted gas, and since they don’t ever have to fix the leaks they consider non-explosive, some of the leaks in the Greater Boston area were first reported decades ago and still have not been fixed.
The leak on the corner of Park Drive and Beacon St in Boston was reported in 1985. It still has not been fixed."
They also have a concise and alarming rundown of the health and environmental effects of methane.
bad latitude longitude data?
They put a pushpin *right* in front of my house, but when you select the pushpin, it identifies a house over on walworth st, several blocks away. This is in roslindale. Garbage in, garbage out.
Natural Gas leaks
This would be more convincing if several of the leaks cited on Fort HIll had not been built over with housing since the leak was reported. It does look as though they had gotten a leak list and then put yellow tabs on a map without talking to the gas company about any of it.
What's the point of the gas leak story?
If a "leak" has existed since 1985, chances are it's not that big a deal. It's like complaining that a few blades of grass are missing from Boston Common. In my experience, any noticeable gas leak would bring a full police, fire and gas company response. For liability reasons alone, any consequential leak would be repaired immediately even on nights, weekends and holidays. Again, citing a leak that's existed since 1985 makes the report almost comical. There are probably a few droplets of water leaking from those mains as well.
The "methane" angle is also laughable. There's probably more methane coming out of the Franklin Park Zoo. If we only had followed Deval's 2009 plan to "put down" the animals to save money, we'd also have less methane.
Does it pinpoint exactly the
Does it pinpoint exactly the streets in Boston neighborhoods where these gas leaks are located!
Gas supply issues
If the utilities are saying that we need more gas to keep us warm in the winter and supplied with electricity year round (after coal and nuclear power were deemed unfashionable), the fact that gas is being allowed to leak (and methane escaping into the atmosphere) is a news story.
I once smelled gas while
I once smelled gas while walking down the sidewalk. I reported it to the fire department. They said people have been reporting that leak to the gas company for years, but they never bothered to fix it.
Questionable data quality
They report a leak at our address, first reported in 2002. We did report a leak back then; the gas company sent someone out immediately (same or next day, if I recall correctly), found it (in an old pipe in our basement), and fixed it. But it's still reported as active.
I question the quality of this data.
Bad data
Not only are the pushpins not in the right places, several of the leaks pinpointed in Watertown have been fixed, some for years.
We're undergoing gas main replacements right now, all over town; the maintainers of this map should go through their data and updated it (massively).
The data came from the
The data came from the utilities and was mapped with Google Maps. Google Maps isn't exact, that's why the address there to doublecheck that Google placed the map pin well.
The utilities report whether these leaks were repaired or not as of March 2015. Because neighborhoods tend to have pipes made of the same material and installed at the same time, whole neighborhoods tend to go "bad" at the same time. This means that if a leak was repaired outside your house, there still could be an unrepaired leak in the area that the utility is tracking.
But we're so hard up for gas
But we're so hard up for gas supply that we need to built a pipeline next to active blasting quarry?????