Gas Line Repair in Damascus, MD
In Damascus, 37% of homes use gas — 34% of it piped and 3% from a tank. A meter is a regulatory boundary; a propane tank is not one.
Read this first
In Damascus, 34% of homes are on mains gas and 3% on bottled, so the town average settles nothing about any one address. Mains gas ends the utility's regulated line at the meter outlet; a tank supply has no such boundary.
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey table B25040; the service line boundary is 49 CFR § 192.3.
If you smell gas right now
Leave the building on foot. Do not use a phone or a light switch inside. Call 911 and your gas utility from somewhere else, and do not call us — we are a referral service, not an emergency line. The full list, in order.
How Damascus is supplied
The split here means a contractor may be quoting on either arrangement, and the first question is which. On mains it also matters which side of the meter the fault is on, because one side may not be a contractor job at all.
| Households in Damascus | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 34% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 3% |
| Electricity | 48% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 12% |
| Wood and everything else | 2% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 4,625 occupied housing units. B25040 is a fuel count, not an infrastructure count. It tells you what burns in these houses, from which the arrangement follows — but it is an inference, not a meter reading. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Maryland as a whole, 45% of households are on mains gas and 3% on tank propane. Damascus sits 11 points below the state on mains and about level with it on propane. That distance from the state average is the whole argument for publishing a town figure at all.
Before anyone digs on the property
One free call before any excavation. PHMSA is blunt about why: excavation damage is the leading cause of pipeline incidents, and 8-1-1 raises the odds of avoiding one to 99 in 100. It applies to a fence post as much as a foundation.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask them to describe the fault before they price it. "The line needs replacing" is not a diagnosis, and on a buried run the difference between one damaged point and a line at the end of its life is most of the cost.
Other Maryland towns we route in
- Silver Spring 53% mains gas · 1% tank propane
- Reisterstown 52% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- Abingdon 40% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Towson 53% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Takoma Park 65% mains gas · 2% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Maryland
Maryland licenses are issued by the Maryland State Board of Plumbing, Department of Labor, which publishes a public search you can use before work begins.
Gas work is separately permitted and separately licensed in most jurisdictions, so ask specifically about gas rather than plumbing in general.
For repair work, not for a suspected leak.If you can smell gas, leave and call 911 or your utility from outside; this is the wrong number for that. For everything else — a line, a meter, an appliance connection — we will route you to a contractor covering your area, free of charge to you. Gas is one part of what Damascus calls us about.
Call (888) 752-8038