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The Map That Reveals 5,900 Natural Gas Leaks Under Washington, D.C.
Researchers say a dozen of them are bad enough to cause explosions.
Last winter, researchers from Duke and Boston University got in a car and drove up and down all 1,500 miles of roadway in Washington, D.C. with a spectrometer and a GPS kit. Their study identified an alarmingly pervasive problem that's otherwise impossible to see: Some 5,893 spots in the city where aging and buried natural gas pipelines leak so much methane that it's possible to detect it above ground.
The leaks produced, on average, methane concentrations more than twice the level of background air samples collected around town. And, according to the study's findings, published this week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, more than a dozen of these spots were giving off enough of the greenhouse gas to cause explosions.