The gas company is letting children sleep above exploding gas lines. Thursday afternoon in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, the pipes beneath a two-story apartment complex caught fire, shaking nearby homes, killing a child and at least two others, sending five more to hospitals, and throwing firefighters outside the threshold onto their own backs as a towering plume of black smoke drifted over the city. The Dallas fire chief has confirmed that firefighters were outside when the blast occurred. They came to save the building; the blast killed them instead.
We do not hear the hissing in the walls when we turn on the stove to make dinner. We think of natural gas as a clean, invisible service, but the infrastructure carrying it is aging, corroded, and often left to rot while utilities bill their shareholders and landlords pocket the rent. The prophets understand this: they name those who “healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14). A cracked gas line in a low-income apartment complex is a wound on the body of the poor. Covering it with a patch and a quarterly report is treating the wound lightly. The child sleeping in Oak Cliff did not rest beneath the gas line to test a corporation’s bottom line.
In the final judgment, the righteous ask when they saw a stranger and welcomed him. Jesus tells us plainly, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40). The least of these right now are the families in that charred Oak Cliff complex, and the firefighters sifting through the rubble by hand. When a utility company treats a tenant’s safety as an optional line item, and property owners treat structural decay as a deferred repair, it is not merely a business failure; it is a moral abandonment of the least of these. We have become a nation that treats these catastrophes as inevitable weather, mere background noise in our political theatre, but the tragedy in Oak Cliff is a predictable consequence of a system that refuses to prioritize the safety of the poor over the convenience of the powerful.
We who live in our own dry, safe apartments do not want to think about the old pipes in the walls of someone else’s home. We have all signed leases that say “tenant responsible for damage” without reading the fine print about who maintains the gas meters, blind to the fact that both the landlord pocketing the rent and the utility hoarding the capital share the culpability for this decay. We are complicit in the silence, because we assume the invisible things around us are safe, and we ask no questions of the men and women who hold the keys. To look upon these ruins and see only misfortune is to commit the sin of indifference.
We have seen this before, when a gas explosion ripped through a Bronx apartment building, killing one and injuring fourteen here, or when a blast tore through a New York City shipyard, killing one and injuring thirty-six, including firefighters here. The story is always the same: we have allowed our housing and our industrial backbone to decay until they literally explode in the faces of our neighbors. “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan,” the prophet Amos commands, addressing those “who oppress the poor, who crush the needy.” The gas company is no better than the ones Amos names; it trades in the invisible, and it profits from our fear.
We can do better than this. Every municipal code must mandate immediate, unannounced safety inspections of aging gas infrastructure, funded by state public-utility commissions, not by the companies’ quarterly profits. Safety is not a liability; it is a covenant. When the gas company stops viewing safety as an optional expense and begins viewing it as a covenant with the people who live inside its walls, the child in Oak Cliff might come home. True compassion demands that we feel the weight of this child’s absence, not as a point to be scored in a partisan debate, but as a judgment on what we have allowed our communities to become. If we cannot ensure that the floor beneath a child’s bed is stable and the air they breathe is not a ticking bomb, then we have failed the most elementary requirement of a society: the protection of the innocent.
The firefighters continue to search the rubble by hand, hoping the bodies they find are not the ones they expected to bring home. May the Lord give those searching the hands of physicians and the hearts of those who do not stop. May the gas company finally look at its ledger, see the cost of the human life it has taken, and repair what it has broken.