Neighbor's water main leak and Boston Gas pipe discovery

Problem with steel — cast iron might last for 150 years and pit some; steel lasts for thirty or forty years. Most of the gas piping in Boston is held together by the clay and the soil. I had a leak in a water pipe in front of my house twenty-five years ago. My house is eighty-five years old. My neighbor comes by at seven o'clock Sunday morning, wakes us up, and says, you've got water bubbling up next to the sidewalk in front of your house. I go look, and you can see this little bubbling stream, a little fountain of water two or three inches high. That's where they had put the water box, the valve between the town's water in the street and the stuff going into my house.

Boston Gas crew arrives with chewing gum to plug the leak the moment the backhoe uncovers the pipe — illustration that buried steel gas pipe is universally leaking after sixty years, the leaks plugged passively by moist soil.

Anytime you dig up around where there are gas pipes, you know that you're going to open up leaks. Twenty years ago one Sunday morning at 7:00 my neighbor calls me and tells me there's water bubbling up between the sidewalk and the driveway in front of my house. Sure enough, they had planted a tree on top of the water box sixty years before, and eventually the roots of the tree and the corrosion caused the water box to break. So I call up the town water department and they come out on Sunday morning, and I'm standing there at 10:00 and they're digging. As they're digging I start smelling gas. Just then — it was Boston Gas back then — the gas truck pulls up. As I'm smelling gas, they had just uncovered the pipe. One of the guys next to the backhoe operator jumps down in the hole, takes some chewing gum out of his mouth, and plugs the hole in the gas pipe. I said, how do you guys know to call Boston Gas? They said, we call them whenever we start the work, because we know when we uncover the pipe we're going to uncover a leak. So all the gas pipe out there is leaking.

Sunday morning four-inch sprinkler in front yard; backhoe operator plugs adjacent gas leak with chewing gum. Used to ground the "the infrastructure is leaking" point.

I didn't understand this until the early or mid eighties. Seven o'clock one Sunday morning, my neighbor two doors down calls me up: "Tom, you've got a leak in your front yard." Tony — he's been a machinist for sixty-some years — he woke up early, he likes to wander around, he's a very friendly busybody. I look out, and sure enough I have this little four-inch sprinkler in the middle, between my sidewalk and the driveway and the street. So I call the town water department on a Sunday morning, and about 10 o'clock they have their backhoe out digging up the street to get to the valve to close this off.