We are celebrating our natural gas employees by recognizing March as Natural Gas Utility Workers’ Month. We are honoring our employees who work tirelessly, day in and day out, to safely maintain more than 3,600 miles of natural gas pipelines serving the company’s more than 138,000 natural gas customers. Not only do they respond 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep the gas flowing safely for our customers, they are also crucial to our efforts to modernize our natural gas system.

“Our natural gas employees play a pivotal role, helping to ensure the safe and efficient delivery of natural gas for our customers,” said Bryan Clark, director of Regional Gas Distribution. “Their commitment to this challenging role provides reliable service to our customers, including on-going modernization efforts and responding at all hours, even on holidays, to ensure customers have the gas they need to heat their home, or serve their meal.”

Modernizing the natural gas delivery system is a core part of our commitment to maintaining safe and reliable service for our customers. The Cast Iron Replacement Project is an ongoing safety and reliability project that replaces aging natural gas infrastructure with plastic, more durable piping.

Each year, we modernize more than five miles of natural gas mains across our service area, replacing existing natural gas mains with new plastic pipe, which enhances safety, is more durable and improves reliability. This year we plan to modernize 8.5 miles of natural gas mains. This comprehensive modernization effort began in 2007. Based on our current schedule, we will have replaced the remaining 57 miles of cast-iron mains and 6 miles of bare-steel mains by 2027, five years ahead of the original schedule. We have replaced more than two-thirds of our cast-iron and bare-steel natural gas mains.

In addition, employees work each day to patrol and inspect natural gas lines, perform regular maintenance, and install new natural gas infrastructure. The investments in modernization and maintenance of the gas system continues to enhance efficiency, reliability and safety for our customers.

This is the seventh year Natural Gas Utility Workers’ Day is being celebrated across the country on March 18. This nationwide event is intended to build public awareness about the hard work done by the employees of natural gas utilities. We join the American Gas Association and natural gas utility companies across the nation, including Exelon sister utilities PECO and BGE, in honoring natural gas workers.