The kind of dramatic scenes that played out in suburban Massachusetts last month following a series of explosions and fires may serve as a warning of what lies ahead for the U.S., where an increasing reliance on natural gas is running up against aging infrastructure.
While there’s no firm conclusion about what caused the series of deadly blasts on Sept. 14, a preliminary National Transportation Safety Board report on the incident released this week says it was linked to work being carried out to replace old pipes. And across the U.S. there’s an awful lot of old pipes: In all, the country has about 80,000 miles of unprotected bare steel and cast or wrought-iron natural gas pipes—enough to wrap around the Earth three times -- much of which dates back to the early 1900s.
