Gas leak scare!

We had a pretty scary weekend at the house this past weekend. Jack and I were playing "Chutes and Ladders" in the living room and I was laying on the floor by the fireplace. Suddenly I noticed the smell of gas, so I opened the fireplace doors and smelled around here there, but didn't smell anything. I finally smelled the little valve in the floor and that's where it was coming from. I called Vectren and told them about it and the lady on the phone took all of my information then told me she was going to "read some safety precautions to me." It went something like this: "Do not turn on any appliances... Do not turn off any appliances... Do not light any candles... Do not turn on or off any lights... Do not answer the phone... Do not hang up the phone... Grab your cell phone and get your family out of the house immediately. Good bye." Needless to say, I was TERRIFIED! Missy was in the shower, the girls were taking a nap, and Jack was laying on the couch watching TV!!!

Well, we chilled out for about 20 min. and then Vectren arrived. The guy went in and checked the valve on the floor, and sure enough, we had a gas leak! He told me all he had to do was "make the situation safe" and turn off our gas, but that would mean we'd have no heat and no hot water until we could fix the problem! So I asked him if there was any way he could just turn off the gas to the fireplace since we never used it. He said maybe there's a valve on the pipe that leads to the fireplace and if so, you could shut it off there. So I said, "OK, that sounds great!" So he said, "OK, go under the house and check it out!" And I said, "Huh? Isn't that your job???" And he said, "Uh no. That's YOUR job!" YIKES!

The guy looked just like Santa Clause and was very funny. He kept telling me everything I needed to do to fix it. He was talking about plugs, unions, nipples, check values, etc. and I finally stopped him and said, "I'm sorry. I have no idea what your talking about." He looked at me real funny and said, "What line of work are you in anyway?" I said, "Computers." He said, "OK, that explains it!"

So anyway, I had to put on the coveralls and crawl under the house to check out the gas pipes.. I was pretty scared going down there b/c I'm not crazy about going under the house anyway, but I was VERY nervous going under there with a gas leak. Unfortunately, there was no valve on that pipe so he had no choice but to shut off the main gas supply to the house... We were going to the RC Christmas Party that night and Mom was supposed to come over to our house to watch the kids, so it was a very hectic afternoon trying to sort all that out. We ended up taking the kids to Lori's house so she could watch them and then spending the night there too.

Greg came over the next morning and helped me (actually, he did all the work!) put a plug on the pipe that goes to the fireplace. There was a "union" there (I finally learned what that means through all this) so all we had to do was disconnect it at the union and screw in a plug. It was pretty scary working down there knowing there was stray gas in the area, but everything worked out great and we got the gas back on in a couple of hours. Jack even went down there with us and he was pretty proud of himself!