Gas Line Repair in Lafayette, OR
Most of Lafayette is on the gas main: 56% of households. That means a meter on the wall and a service line under the ground, and a boundary between them that federal rules put in a specific place.
Read this first
A buried service line and a meter sit on most properties in Lafayette, where 56% of homes are on mains gas. Federal rules end the utility's service line at the meter outlet, so everything downstream of the meter is the owner's to maintain and repair.
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 Lafayette is supplied
A buried run from the street to a meter, and piping onward through the property. Federal rules end the service line at the meter outlet; what comes after is customer piping.
The piping people forget they own is the buried run from the meter to a detached garage, a grill or a pool heater. That is theirs, and it may not be marked when somebody comes to locate lines.
| Households in Lafayette | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 56% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 3% |
| Electricity | 36% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 0% |
| Wood and everything else | 6% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 1,432 occupied housing units. What B25040 measures is the heating fuel, not the connection. It is the closest published proxy for whether there is a buried service line here, and it is a proxy. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Oregon as a whole, 44% of households are on mains gas and 2% on tank propane. Lafayette sits about level with the state on propane; its mains share carries too wide a margin of error to compare. A state figure would flatten exactly that difference, which is the reason these pages are built town by town instead.
Before anyone digs on the property
8-1-1 is free and nationwide, and PHMSA gives callers a 99 percent chance of avoiding an incident, injury or worse. Ask them what they will and will not mark: privately owned buried lines on your own side of the meter frequently are not covered.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask how much gas work they actually do, not whether they can. Gas is separately licensed in most jurisdictions and plenty of capable plumbers do very little of it.
Other Oregon towns we route in
- Cascade Locks under 1% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Gales Creek 6% mains gas · 19% tank propane
- Molalla 37% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- Corbett 1% mains gas · 13% tank propane
- Donald 39% mains gas · 1% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Oregon
Oregon licenses are issued by the Oregon Building Codes Division, Department of Consumer and Business Services, which publishes a public search you can use before work begins. Plumbing businesses in Oregon must also hold a Construction Contractors Board license, which is a separate search.
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. Non-emergency work in Lafayette goes through this number as well.
Call (888) 752-8038