Today I (virtually) attended part of the Baltimore City CHAP meeting. I was running late from a previous meeting and then struggled to log in, so I missed the first 8 minutes and stayed later to make up for it. The entire hour and a half that I was in attendance, the discussion centered on BGE's claim that, to maximize safety, they have to install natural gas components outside historic homes, which seems to have only become the case within the past couple of months. This installation represents, at the very least, aesthetic and very possibly structural integrity problems for these homes. Speakers included the commissioners, community members, and BGE representatives. I found the community members more convincing than the BGE representatives; I was inevitably thinking of my own recent experiences with BGE as I made that assessment though.
On 6 Oct 2021, Verizon, without notifying anyone (including Miss Utility!) ahead of time, sent contractors to dig up our and our next-door neighbor's front yards to hook up service for someone ... around the corner? (At least, the contractors claimed that they worked for Verizon. Verizon later claimed that they had no record of having sent anyone to do that work and could not identify these workers.) In the process they hit the gas main and caused a gas leak in my front yard but didn't attempt to inform my family, who was mostly home at the time. The fire department quickly arrived, followed by BGE, who checked near our front door (for leaking gas?) with some kind of gauge, which I witnessed thanks to our Ring doorbell system. BGE also called Miss Utility to report the emergency dig they had to do after the leak. After we all left, BGE turned off our gas, requiring us to call them to arrange an inspection to get it turned back on, which we did. Later, BGE informed us that whatever they did to turn our gas back on that day was temporary. They were going to need to make another appointment with us for another visit out here to fully repair the damage.
On 12 Oct, BGE made their third trip to our home in a week to explain that the repair that they still need to do is actually replacing our entire gas line because the current one is too close to the surface. Also it runs oddly diagonally across our yard. This project will involve ripping up part of our street and our yard, although they promise that they will fix all of it eventually. They will leave the old line where it is, but they will no longer use it at that point.
However, when a company came to do landscaping repair on the yards, as BGE had promised, they told us that they had not been told to do anything in our yard. We called BGE, who sent someone to our house again, unannounced, while I was in between back-to-back meetings. Their argument was that the ticket they'd given to the repair company included our yard, and that ticket was marked completed, so the landscaping company must have repaired our yard.
... Not everyone understands logic.
Of course, if grass doesn't grow in the spring, we can call BGE, and they'll get it fixed then, right?
A larger concern is the fact that all the houses on our street were built by the same company around the same time (in 1972). Shouldn't one at least suspect that their gas lines were also too shallow and in need of replacement then? Or are they really going to only do what they saw they have to do and not even check everyone else's? It seems, unfortunately, that the latter is the case. No one else's lines were replaced while the street was ripped up -- just ours. We did deliver a note to all of our neighbors urging them to consider demanding that BGE inspect their gas lines too.
The important takeaway for me, however, was that BGE is indeed more concerned with minimizing costs than with any sort of responsibility to the communities they serve. That is why I found the community members more credible.
Of course, I did not stay long enough to learn the outcome of the discussion, and I couldn't quite read the commissioners during the meeting well enough to determine where they seemed to be leaning on this issue. I realized when I looked up the above link for CHAP that it is part of the Baltimore City government. Consequently, I have to wonder how well they serve their intended purpose and the community members who come before them. How much power to supersede BGE does this committee have? How do commissioners get these positions? And do they typically go way over the planned times for discussions? If so, what happens to the discussions they don't get to when the meeting finally ends? Is there a risk that that may happen next month, when the Sarah Ann Street homes are on the agenda?
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