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A house blowing up out of nowhere
(i.imgur.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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Catastrophic Failure
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A catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure from which recovery is impossible. Catastrophic failures often lead to cascading systems failure. The term is most commonly used for structural failures, but has often been extended to many other disciplines in which total and irrecoverable loss occurs, such as a head crash occurrence on a hard disk drive. Such failures are investigated using the methods of forensic engineering, which aims to isolate the cause or causes of failure. (Wikipedia)
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I cannot speak for this situation but I can offer some insight into the systems responsible. One of my firm's specializations is data integrity and optimization, and one of our clients is a utilities company. The system we managebis supposed to detect, report, and shutdown any gas meter with anomalous behavior, then dispatch a crew to investigate. The SLA (maximum allowed time before penalties are incurred) from anomaly to shutdown is two minutes. We have it down to under thirty seconds.
If this was an accidental gas leak severe enough to prompt for a crew dispatch, then the meter should have been shut down long before there was enough lost gas to blow up a house.
PS: Propane tank fueled furnace in the basement is bad, mmmmkay.
Interesting. How do you differentiate between someone turning on a stove on high for 15 minutes, vs a burst pipe?
I'm not a professional or an expert but I know that even when you turn it up to full it's not releasing as much gas as it would if you just opened it up and let it go freely from the pipe. No matter what you have it plugged into, your gas line is being pressure regulated.
Ah good point.
We focus on making sure that the data in ingested and processed in a timely manner. The logic is internal to the app so I don't have visibility into that but I know the meters also monitor other metrics like line pressure.