This is probably a stupid idea, (I know absolutely nothing about natural gas) but why can't we emergency vent the gas outside?
My gas meter is already outside the house, more than 30 feet away from anything flammable. In an emergency overpressure like this, shouldn't I be able to pull some sort of emergency lever to vent the gas outside.
Yeah, that gas is flammable, which is risky. But that has to be less risky than just sitting around waiting for my house to blow up, which seems to be my only option today.
If your gas installation is anything like mine, you could go outside and shut off the feed into your house. There's a valve that you could turn with a crescent wrench. Mine, at least, has a hole in it that the gas company can put a lock through when the valve is shut (which is what they do when they cut off your gas service).
That way you're at least not going to have the inside of your house fill with gas.
The trick with an overpressure gas main is that pulling that lever isn't going to be a "gas vents off for a few seconds and then things are good again" event. You won't be just reducing the pressure for your house, you'll be reducing the pressure for your entire neighbourhood, and there's going to be a pretty significant amount of gas that needs to vent.
Also, I'm not sure if this is the case with methane, but propane has a really fun property... Going from compressed/liquified propane to gas propane has a high enough latent heat of vaporization that it can cool the surrounding liquid enough to freeze it (!!!). There was a court case around here a few years ago with a propane truck that blew a valve and started venting propane to the atmosphere. The liquid->gas transition cooled off the valve so much that a solid propane plug formed and stopped the leak (-188 degC!). Temporarily, of course... the plug eventually thawed, the gas continued escaping, and things got bad again. Having devices that could experience similar behaviour installed at peoples' homes seems pretty dangerous to me.
It's all a shitty situation. Really, this is on the gas company. Their pumps should have never gotten the lines pressurized like this, and they should have had mechanisms in place to vent it in a controlled and safe fashion.
My gas meter is already outside the house, more than 30 feet away from anything flammable. In an emergency overpressure like this, shouldn't I be able to pull some sort of emergency lever to vent the gas outside.
Yeah, that gas is flammable, which is risky. But that has to be less risky than just sitting around waiting for my house to blow up, which seems to be my only option today.