Speaker's home gas service sleeving (three-quarter inch pipe)

Continuation of the neighbor anecdote — Tom's house and another nearby flagged with high soil gas concentrations; service sleeved with plastic pipe inside the original steel. Tom alludes to a "another story" (gas accumulation in the house) but does not develop it.

A few years later — they come by like every three years and stick probes in the ground to see how much natural gas is in the ground — at my house and another house six or seven houses down, they found so much gas that they came in and sleeved the steel pipe with plastic pipe. They have little connectors that they've developed over time to be able to connect steel to plastic. Manual connectors with compression seals between the metal and the plastic, and they usually work pretty good. There's another story that goes on with that but I won't tell it right now. It did fill up my house with gas one time, but it didn't blow, or I wouldn't have that house. So that's another form of pressure welding. It's hot, it's not necessarily cold.

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The plastic-to-steel transition leak that nearly flooded the speaker's home with gas; the lost Boston Gas work order; speaker's escalation to state regulators.

They come sniffing down the street and at two houses, mine and another one, they find too much gas in the soil. So what do they do? They sleeve the pipe. It's too expensive to dig it up and replace it. And they wouldn't replace it with a new steel pipe anyway, they'd replace it with a plastic pipe. They dig up the street, they run a plastic sleeve pipe through into my house — don't dig up my front yard, and everything's fine. Well, except it's not fine. They have to make a plastic-to-steel connection on the inside.