Sorry, I meant to type higher resistance. On my water heater, the equivalent part that is glowing in the picture is a really thin flexible corrugated gas pipe that surely can carry much much less current than the iron gas pipe feeding it before it went really high resistance. I could totally see it glowing like this with enough current. But if it is aluminum (not sure if it is), what you said makes sense.

My gas pipe to the house comes out of the ground inside a plastic protective pipe sleeve, so I can imagine it possibly not having enough of a low resistance path to earth to trip one of the cutout fuses on the primary distribution line. Granted, mine also has a big ground wire bonding it to the house ground, which I would think would help here…

/shrug I was just sharing what I read. It was supposedly the explanation as to why local breakers on the house didn’t trip.

I think in this case the power heating the pipes is not coming from this house’s electrical service, so killing the main breaker probably won’t help.

When this was posted on Reddit recently, someone claimed this was caused by a fallen power line that made contact with a gas line. So, power flowing into the house through gas pipe and back out through equipment grounds, heating up lower resistance gas pipes in the process.

Photo reportedly taken by fire fighters or gas company employees.

Edit: I meant to type higher resistance…

unless the gas pipe melted through

That looks pretty damn likely imminent to me…

So glad my wife is not like that