Home › Washington › Lopez Island
Gas Line Repair in Lopez Island, WA
Lopez Island is largely a town without gas: 14% of households use it at all. That makes the buried service line a minority arrangement, and the people who have one worth talking to specifically.
Read this first
Only 14% of homes in Lopez Island use gas for heat. That makes a gas line the exception rather than the rule, and the ones that exist are usually tank supplies owned on the property instead of utility service lines ending at a meter.
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 Lopez Island is supplied
Most properties here have no service line and no meter. For the minority that do, everything on this site applies exactly as it does in a gas town.
| Households in Lopez Island | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 2% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 11% |
| Electricity | 55% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 9% |
| Wood and everything else | 23% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 1,464 occupied housing units. The table counts heating fuel rather than pipework. A house on mains gas almost certainly has a service line; the Census does not say so directly and neither do we. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Washington as a whole, 39% of households are on mains gas and 2% on tank propane. Lopez Island sits 37 points below the state on mains and 9 points above it on propane. That is the gap a statewide number papers over, and the reason the figures above are this town’s rather than the state’s.
Before anyone digs on the property
Before any digging — a fence post as much as a foundation — call 8-1-1. It is a nationwide toll-free number, it costs nothing, and PHMSA puts the chance of avoiding an incident afterwards at 99 percent.
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 Washington towns we route in
- Duvall 43% mains gas · 7% tank propane
- North Bend 45% mains gas · 6% tank propane
- Mukilteo 57% mains gas · 1% tank propane
- Coupeville 1% mains gas · 26% tank propane
- Olga 3% mains gas · 12% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Washington
Washington licenses are issued by the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, 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. Non-emergency work in Lopez Island goes through this number as well.
Call (888) 752-8038