When they announce a show, next to the advertisement you find published the prices of the seats. Always the first row is the most expensive, which are usually purchased by the wealthiest. Ostentatious? Perhaps. The truth is that those in attendance to the play, always show curiosity to know who is seated there because that’s the row with the best view.
This is our case. Although it is not a theater, we were fortunate to have front row seats to observe the development of the drama that is currently experiencing the City of Lawrence, specifically the south of the city with the replacement of gas pipelines that began in front of our house, where our offices are located, on Tuesday, September 25.
It is already in the public domain, that in the wake of the gas explosions that occurred on Thursday, September 13, 2018, and that engulfed dozens of homes across the Merrimack Valley, Columbia Gas announced that it would replace approximately 49 miles of underground gas pipelines in Andover, North Andover and Lawrence, for which they were given a deadline of November 19 to have the work completed.
On Tuesday, September 25, from the corner of Beacon Street, they began cutting with a circular saw two paralleled lines on the asphalt on Mt. Vernon Street, in the direction of South Broadway. The next day, Wednesday, they arrived with heavy machinery and began digging along the two lines they had cut the previous day, in order to bury the new pipe.
In this way, they continued until Saturday the 29th. By the end of the day, they had surpassed the water tanks located on Mt. Vernon Street, at a distance of about two blocks or so from the corner of Beacon.
We are not experts in this matter. If we detail what happened it is not to criticize but to praise the work done by this group. We do not know who they are or where they came from, if they came from somewhere. We just want to highlight the professionalism with which they did their work. They followed a well coordinated plan, for what we could appreciate. At the end of each day, they cleaned the area where they had worked, leaving the spot intact.
In our opinion, if the promise to complete the immense task that Columbia Gas has committed to finish by November 19 is not achieved, we do not believe that it will be the fault of this crew, that for four days, we had the pleasure of observing from our first row, at no cost.
