I don’t know about the rest of the nation but the natural gas infrastructure in Massachusetts is comically terrible. It isn’t unusual to be walking down the street in Boston (note: a separate utility than tonight’s incident) and to walk into a cloud of natural gas. I had such a cloud on my residential street for years that was strong enough to burn your eyes. National Grid would come by every few months, stick a probe in the ground, and declare it not worth fixing despite our repeated calls. I wonder how much of their product actually makes it from production facilities to end households without leaking out along the way.