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When I was in college in the late 80s, I had a summeer job at Bat State Gas in Springfield with one of my buddies. They paid us $5-6 per hour, but our job was in the Corrosion Engineering Department. Basically, all we did was take a voltmeter and test the voltage in the pipe to ground. I believe, that if a number of houses in a neighborhood all showed poor results (I can't recall a good from bad reading), a crew would be called to reinstall anodes, welded to the main supply line out near the street. The anodes purpose was to help inhibit corrosion of the pipes.
I wonder how well that monitoring has been going or has it been ignored. I would assume, there is a lifetime expectancy for these black iron pipes, anodes or no anodes. If the state put them all in in the same general time period, we may be seeing the aging process catching up to us, similar to all the bridges that have been failing inspections.
Now the utility companies can raise our costs to fix a problem they should have been expecting and had a plan for all along.
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