saw this on another forum, dont know how much truth there is to it but the pics are crazy…
o.O ouch.
must have def been pretty beefy of a digger to do that… unless he wanted to do it on purpose.
i do oil pipeline jobs from time to time, and that shit is usually pretty damn thick wall.
but since it’s a gas pipeline i don’t know much about those.
don’t get those too often.
Man, too bad there are no pictures of the fireball. It must have been insane.
I watched the guys operating a back hoe hit a gas line over at main and spindrift. You could hear the hissing from our office about 300 yards away. The worst part was it was the national fuel guys doing the digging when they did their major renovations 4 years ago. They’re the ones you call to see where to dig! It was just dumb luck it didn’t explode in the 10’minutes or so it took them to shut it off.
Haha, stupid fucker.
I called the number when I put my fence up. Everyone showed up or gave the all clear… Found a 12" Storm sewer running through my yard unmarked… luckilly I knew it was there from when they replaced it. They just never came to mark the thing. Gotta be careful no matter what when you dig.
I would like mythbusters to recreate this and then some.
Aren’t bigger lines flagged with permanent poles in rural areas? I think they are around here…
why is that under a farmers field??? After enough farming chisel plowing will come close to that pipe!!
It wasn’t a backhoe.
37 foot wide, 15 foot deep crater, and a 1125-foot diameter burn circle. Corrosion kills, kids.
Thank you.
For anyone who isn’t into link clicking, that is an explosion from a gas pipeline, but not caused by a farmer digging. It was a 30" pipeline with natural gas at 800 psi (for reference, when it comes into your house it’s at about 0.25 psi) installed in the 1950’s. It does span across the country, but not in one straight solid run or anything crazy like that. It goes through various pumping stations, branches, valves, etc. But it is a main supply line that spans the country at 800 psi.
The pipe failed mechanically. Basically it rusted and broke. The ignition was probably caused by the gas hitting a crazy high velocity when the pipe broke and released all that pressure and the resulting particulate collisions in the high velocity gas stream causing a spark.
My father is currently working on a project redoing water mains for the city of Buffalo not because they really need to be done, but because they have no clue where the fuck they are run underneath the ground. A lot of our older utilities were done when a liquid lunch was common and what was drawn on paper is not what happened in reality.
That’s wild. I guess some places (not necessarily in Buffalo, more rural townships) still have wood water pipes.
lol @ everyone ignoring Fry’s links 
hahaha i was thinking that as i was reading down the thread, hilarious.
cant believe it was corrosion… so basically it could happen anywhere anytime and you wouldnt know… underground corrosion.
also… in this case i believe snopes since there is soome supporting evidence… but snopes is not automatically correct.
No, thank you. I was wondering what sparked it.
This is the part that is scary…so many things that we can’t control.
plastic/composite?
p/s I <3 your car