Why yes, that is a natural gas line running to the furnace and water heater: https://www.reddit.com/r/electricians/comments/1fpo26t/not_something_you_see_everyday_evidently_this/
Not something you see everyday. Evidently this image has gone a bit viral, but this is a friend of mines house. She hit me up wondering if I knew what might cause it. The flex was pulling about 175 amps and was at 1200 degrees. There's to be a whole news story on it and everything.
Mother of god, dare I say this post..... blew up. There are a lot of questions and there is no way I can get to everyone. Basically, during a storm a tree fell on the incoming lines and it caused some fucked up high voltage things and created a new ground.
yikes. worse than I thought
yeah that's on the more catastrophic end of scale, nothing can be done at that residential address
why is the US grid so feeble that leakages of this size (and surely a whole neighborhood's gas network getting heated to these temperatures is detectable, right?) aren't automatically disabled by the power company's computers or some other controllers in the network?
They would have to have a lot of switches and network wires connecting them and systems to monitor them. Even then, I doubt this draw would be enough to signal to them that it's a problem. Probably not drawing more than a stove on the cleaning cycle, far below a level that would say, "This area is drawing too much power".
The post say s it was 175A which is substantial but still not enough to notice at a neighborhood level of they were monitoring there.
I see, so less many US house's capacities in total current leakage? This post makes me so grateful I don't have a gas connection in my building
edit: was that total current leaked in the whole neighborhood or just the one house?
From the post it implies that 175A was going into the house (but bypassing the meter so it couldn't be caught there)
So yeah it would be like ~+1 maxed out house running like 10 space heaters