No, not the kind with an Epee.
Just walked in from Savannah, via Tennessee, etc. While in Savannah, the boy asked me to help him tear down an old rotten piece of wood fence at their house, and put it back up. Total of 16 feet was all. The house next door was putting in a new one and it was a good time to match it and make it look good. Done a bunch of these, no problem.......
Course, it was over 80 most days I was there (from Dec 23 till yesterday), so that part wasn't fun!!! But we finally got the stuff and tore down the old fence, and Saturday we were digging fence post holes. Even that was easy, as their ground is pure loam......... he is building a double fence, each 4', so we used 10' 4X4's for both gate posts and buried them 3' in the ground with quickrete to hold the weight of gates. Even a 3' hole was easy to dig, no problem.
Well, the boy went to town to get something or other that we forgot, and I was digging the 2nd post hole. I got it about 3' deep, stuck the post in the ground and it just twitched the stringline, so I figured "OK, one more thrust with the posthole diggers".
Well, that was the problem. SSPPPPEEEEWWWWWWWWW was the next sound I heard after that last thrust. Uh, huh??? Didn't take long to figure out what it was..............Natural Gas!!!
Right then, the boy drives up, and runs over and I'm sort of stunned, not sure what to do. Gas smell is all over the yard, next yard, out into street.........bad news. The guy building the next door fence was a smoker and we had to make sure he didn't light up! The boy grabs a shovel and pushes all that dirt back into the hole. That maybe helped, for sure, but dang sure wasn't stopping things. This was also about 4' from their pool........full of water.
He gets on the phone, calling 911, the County, Fire Dept, you name it. No one is much help........but one guy finally tells him to call Atlanta Gas and Electric. Means nothing to me, at this point I'm sort of just standing there, making sure Grandma and neighbors don't fire up the grill, etc. Turns out he gets the right folks and they said they'd send someone out in about one hour. We look all over the yard and behind back fence, etc. for a meter.........but no meter. None. Nowhere! Odd.
OK.......so now it gets weird. The house has NO gas service. It does have an old gas valve coming up next to the foundation, but it's shut....so no gas is getting into the house other than ambient gas from the leak. I sort of scratch my head and ask when was the last time gas was used at the house? The boy's fiance, who owns the house and has for 15 years, said......."Um......long LONG time ago!". So, I ask why there is pressure on the line if there is no gas service and hasn't been for 15 years???
It stinks, but it's not too bad...........and the guy finally shows up. He is pretty calm about it, but he is flabbergasted that there is pressure on the line. He said that not only did this house lose service 15 years ago, but the entire island (Wilmington Island) was decommissioned by Atlanta Gas years ago! There is NO SERVICE anywhere. He said that there is ZERO way that there should be pressure in that line, and he didn't even know where to go to find the Main and turn it off! He said it just doesn't exist. I said 'Duh, dude, yes it does'.
He's still calm, and grabs a shovel and digs out a hole way wider than the post hole, and down below the pipe.........it's a plastic gas pipe, spewing to beat the band, loudly...........while his face is down there by it working on it. He finally gets to where he can handle it and gets some kind of contraption on it to cap it off. It's cut in half on the house side of the rupture, so he says we can go ahead and put the fence post in....so we do after he leaves.
He said that they'd have to get a crew in and they'd have to dig from the rupture to the street (this is a Cul De Sac, and all pie shaped lots, so a mess.........) to figure out where it's coming from. He spent a long time on phone, and he said they can't even find any records of the gas pipe/main layout!!
So, it coulda been disastrous! Maybe I'm making lemonade out of lemons, but I'm thinking this is a blessing in disguise. Guy said that if this house has pressure, they probably all do. He said if they have a meter, it'd be cut off, but most houses around do not have meters. Meaning......he has no idea the extent of houses on the entire island that have similar issues!!! First guy digging out for a pool, or fence, or whatever.........and ruptures it next to a flame, and the whole place could go up.
So.....it'll be interesting to see how it works out.
But that's the weirdest fence I ever helped build, ever since Bob Woodard decided to twist the turtle-back posts 90 degrees AFTER they'd been in concrete for 2 hours! He was a monster.......