DRIVEN TO BED TO KEEP WARM.
GAS PRESSURE GOES DOWN,
LEAVING THE CITY COLD.
BLAME IS PLACED ON FIELDS.
"ALL RIGHT IN THE MORNING,"
SAYS THE COMPANY.
Cold Snap Made Plumbers' Fingers
Stiff in the Gas Belt, and They
Couldn't Connect Pipes, Etc.
Gas Lakes Reported Frozen.
During supper hour last evening, and for several hours before and after, the gas supply was poor. There was no other name for it -- poor. In the northeast portion of the city and in the eastern and southern parts there are complaints of almost no gas at all and people had to go to bed to keep warm. The gas lacked both in heat unites and illuminating power, and in most households it was found necessary to turn on the furnaces to their full capacity to get any warmth at all.
One peculiarity noted by many a sh ivering, anxious basement watcher was that the meters seemed to measure just as much imaginary gas while there was little gas or no gas, as they did on nights when there was enough to warm the rooms and make light sufficient to read a paper.
"We're not getting the gas from the fields, that's the trouble,' was the satisfaction consumers got from the gas company. "The sudden change in the temperature caught them unprepared in the fields, and they have been necessarily slow in connecting up additional wells with the pupmps. This will be all attended to in the morning, and there will be no more trouble this winter."
A FAMILIAR TUNE.
Consumers recalled having heard similar statements last winter when the gas supply failed every time the thermometer registered below the freezing point, and they were not prepared for a like excuse for yesterday's shortage of gas in view of the rosy tales carried home by the city officials who recently visited the fields, the solemn assurances of an abundance of the product there and the extra improvements that had been put in for getting it to consumers in Kansas City.
Little by little the gauges at the reducing station, Thirty-ninth and State Line, where the gas from the flow lines from the gas fields connect with the city's distributing mains, showed spells of sinking yesterday, indicating a lack of gas pressure. As the hours wore on and the kitchen ranges and lights were turned on, the symptoms became alarming. Marked depression, slow pulse, difficult respiration, and all indications of a moribund patient alarmed everybody but the doctor. He was accustomed to it, having seen many a household darkened in the full years of his experience. The normal pressure is forty-five pounds at the reducing station. At 7:30 o'clock last night it was twenty-three. It didn't look like the patient would live until morning. It was twenty-three. Just a coincidence. Nothing more. Twenty-three.
In some high altitude there was no gas at all, and there were many complaints.
THEY WANTED TO KNOW.
Every home in Kansas City dependent on gas for heat and illumination was effected, and during the early hours of the evening the office of The Journal was besieged with inquiries as to the cause of the weak supply. Mayor Thomas T. Crittenden, Jr., also put in some busy hours telling people over the telephone that he couldn't account for the slump, and repeated what the gas company told him abot the supply being frozen over, the lakes of gas being frozen over, or some such thing, in the gas fields.
"It's fierce," said the mayor shortly after 8 o'clock. "In the last two hours I've had fifty complaints over the telephone about shortage of gas. The complaints come from every part of the city, and vary from no gas at all to a scanty supply for illumination and heat. The high points northeast and east seem to be the principal sufferers. I can't understand it. There is plenty of gas in the fields, and plenty of power to deliver it to Kansas City, if it were not for the fact that the gauges at the intake, or reduction station at Thirty-ninth and State Line indicate a meager supply from the gas fields. I would feel disposed to blame today's and tonight's troubles to local conditions, or, to be more explicit, to failure on the part of the distributing company to install proper facilities for the delivery of the gas.
