`Century-old carbon steel gas pipe fractures`

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.

Generic reference to news-cycle reports of buried hundred-year-old gas pipes fracturing. Used to motivate the inspection-after-substitution problem.

Now we have fractures, different types of gas pipes. You can have plain carbon steel — you've probably seen in the news, hundred-year-old pipes that break and cause a major inconvenience. So the issue is, once it's in the ground, are you going to maintain it, are you going to leave it in place? You don't want to have to dig this stuff up every five years to inspect it. As you substitute from one material to another, how are you going to inspect this over time to make sure it's still functionally and structurally sound?

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