Natural Gas Pipe Xplosion in Residentail area

I've been following this incredible story on the news over the past few days. Thursday night just after 6pm when people would typically be home from work, a 30 inch high pressure natural gas pipe blew a 60 foot x 30 foot wide hole in the middle of the street and errupted into a ball of fire. The blowtorch burned for more than an hour before PGE were able to get the valves shut off. This is a compact neighborhood so the fire lept from house to house pretty easily, in the end 37 houses burned to the ground and another 8 or so damaged. So far only four fatalities have been reported and a few people are in the burn unit, others just had to be treated for smoke inhilation. The deaths/ injury numbers are thankfully and surprisingly low considering the time of day. I guess unless you were in a house right in front of where the street blew apart, you had some time to realize what was happening and get out of the way. There are some reports that residents had reported to PGE about the smell of gas up to three weeks before this happened so I'm sure that'll be investigated heavily. The entire area has the utilities shut off so there are a lot of people displaced from their homes right now waiting for the area to be safe and the utilities to be turned on.

The neighborhood is in the city of San Bruno, about 15 miles from San Francisco.  Not close to me but close enough that i'm thinking ok... where are the gas pipes in my neighborhood.  I'm sure they were installed about the same time.

Anyway here are some pictures, it was a pretty incredible sight.