Ed Pawlowski wrote:

"Pete C." wrote in message

On that last part, I've seen at least four reports of houses leveled by
gas explosions on CNN.com in the last few weeks alone. Oddly enough, not
a single report of a house exploding from an electrical issue.

Sure, gas pops a couple of houses a year, but electrical fires are far more
common, just not as dramatic.. Same with oil burners, woodstoves, coal
stoves, etc.

Not as dramatic, not as likely to damage neighbors homes and most
importantly a lot less likely to kill the occupants. Boom, you're dead,
vs. fire, you run.

The fact that you hear of a house blowing up from gas shows
how rare it is if it makes more than the local news.

Not really, it's just more likely to kill the occupants and as we all
know, the media loves dead people.

How many people were
killed in traffic accidents this week? They are so common they don't even
make the local news. IIRC, there are still 40-50,0000 traffic deaths a
year, but no big outcry to fix anything.

Indeed there are plenty of traffic accidents, and generally they get
local press as well (media loves death remember). The key difference is
that there aren't viable alternatives to traffic, your drive, take a
bus, train, and all have plenty of accidents. On the home front, there
are safer alternatives to gas in the home, so you are able to make a
choice to reduce risk. You can also make a choice to reduce risk by
having gas detectors too, but for some reason people tend to overlook
this and only think about smoke and now CO detectors.