Thursday, September 09, 2010

Another MSP house blows up

This is the 2nd or 3rd time in the past year a Minneapolis St Paul house has blown up, presumably due to a gas explosion, while sewer line construction work was being done ...

House explodes in Richfield; no one injured | StarTribune.com
... The 3:50 p.m. explosion in the 7600 block of 11th Av. S. leveled the house, set its ruins on fire and sent flames up the sides of two adjacent homes .... The homeowner was away, and his two daughters were in school, according to Richfield Fire Chief Brad Sveum. He confirmed that the family's dog was missing...
We don't know this one was a gas explosion. In similar recent episodes the culprit has been a methodology of constructing gas and sewer lines that led to occasional intersection. When sewer line work is done the gas line is punctured. It's assumed there are many unknown intersections out there, just waiting for sewer line work to expose them. I assume some of these are caught prior to explosion.

It does remind me how crude our world is, that we still pipe astoundingly explosive gas into our homes to create heat. By now we were all supposed to have fusion reactors in the basement (those explosions would be even more impressive).

I wish voters would show more interest in exploding houses, and less interest in Glenn Beck.

Update: To everyone's surprise, the dog turned up. Fur singed all about, but otherwise pretty well.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

In California, what might be a far worse example of the same problem:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11263439

Unknown said...

I'm really glad the dog turned up too. I've been wishing for months that I could cook on a gas stove, but maybe after reading this and hearing about the San Bruno disaster (and the propane tanks exploding in the Boulder CO fire) I'm glad the Medford gas company was too lazy to get past the railroad tracks. Electric cooking and oil heat it will be for us.

Unknown said...

I'm really glad the dog turned up too. I've been wishing for months that I could cook on a gas stove, but maybe after reading this and hearing about the San Bruno disaster (and the propane tanks exploding in the Boulder CO fire) I'm glad the Medford gas company was too lazy to get past the railroad tracks. Electric cooking and oil heat it will be for us.