Thread: Weird News
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Old 09-14-2018, 07:56 AM   #3927
glatt
 
Join Date: Jul 2003
Location: Arlington, VA
Posts: 27,717
Not a good time to own stock in Columbia Gas of Massachusetts.

When your workers fuck up doing a gas line replacement and blow up 40 houses, displace 8,000 people, and kill one person, you're doing something wrong.

Can you imagine? They must have turned off the gas, all the pilot lights in town went out, and then they turned it back on again. The gas flowed through all those appliances with no pilot lights to ignite it, and then the houses blew up when the concentrations got high enough.

I wonder if hackers can hack the municipal gas valves remotely and do a terrorist attack that way?

Makes me wonder exactly how gas appliances work. Do modern ones only open the gas valves when certain ignition temperatures are confirmed? I know my oven works that way, but my 70 year old furnace doesn't. How about water heaters? Is there some sort of pilot light confirmation system?
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