The following morning, I performed my weekly inspection of the main distribution manifold. It was a Wednesday: cold and overcast, the frost heavy on the lower field, the kind of morning that smelled of iron and coming winter. I walked the corridor from the tank to the manifold the way I had walked it a thousand times, checking fittings, reading the pressure gauge, noting the regulator output in the spiral-bound notebook. Everything was within specification. The system was running exactly as it should.
I stood at the manifold for a moment, looking at the valve assembly I had installed in 2009, and I made the decision I had been turning over in my mind since the ruling arrived. It was not a dramatic decision. It was, in the technical sense, a routine one. I had every legal right to perform it: the land was mine, the tank was mine, the manifold was mine. The court had said so in writing, and the county record had said so for 31 years before that.
I reached down and closed the main distribution valve.
Not permanently. Not vindictively. For one hour: the duration of a standard pressure isolation test, which is a procedure I perform periodically on any system I maintain to verify line integrity and confirm that no section of the distribution network has developed a slow leak. It is documented in the maintenance logs. It is standard practice. It is, in every meaningful sense, exactly the kind of work that 31 years of maintenance records show I have always done on this system, on this land, on my own schedule and by my own judgment.
I set my watch and walked back to the equipment barn to make a note of the start time.
What happened in those 61 homes during that hour, I learned from Warren, who had not been warned, and who experienced it the same way every other resident of Ridgeline Pines did: as a sudden, complete, and inexplicable absence.
Furnaces that had been cycling normally went quiet. Ranges that had been lit went dark. Water heaters that had been maintaining temperature began to cool. The subdivision, which had never in its existence had reason to think about where its gas came from or whose land it crossed to get there, discovered in the space of a few minutes that it had no gas at all, and no explanation, and no one to call who could tell them why.
Warren told me later that the first calls went to the propane delivery company, which confirmed that the supply tank was full, the delivery schedule was current, and the problem was not on their end. The next calls went to Gerald Foss, who apparently said he would look into it. Several residents called the HOA's general line, which rang to a voicemail box that Diane Coulter managed. She called the delivery company herself, got the same answer Warren had gotten, and then—and this is the part Warren described with a flatness that told me he understood exactly what he was watching—she drove out to the tank.