Someone hit a gas meter
I was on my way home from my friends house early Sunday morning at a little past 3:30 AM and the roads were icy from the freezing rain and as I drove down one of them I heard this loud hissing sound and instantly as I drove past it I could tell it was coming from the right hand side of the road and then I smelled the strong smell of mercaptan which is added to natural gas to make it smell the way it does. Someone had obviously hit a gas meter along the side of the road which I knew a few were in that area. I however don't know why some houses have their gas meters in the middle of their front yards along side the road when most houses have them right against the house but that was the way it was and apparently someone slid into it and broke it. I was going to call 911 to see if anyone knew about it since there were no emergency vehicles present but then when I got home which was only a few minutes later I decided not to. This was because I did remember a white truck in a driveway on the opposite side of the road with its head lights pointed in that approximate direction from which the hissing sound was coming so I figured chances were that the person in the truck knew about it do I didn't need to call about it but I still could have, I might have found at a thing or two about it from the dispatcher if I did but I decided not to. It was interesting though and later when it got light outside and after church I drove past that area again and sure enough there was a gas meter that had this stuff wrapped around one side of it with the ground fromt eh road to it and all around it all freshly dug up, they must have had some backhoe or something come out in the wee hours of the morning int he freezing rain to do that, that must have been a fun project, haha.