Students from St. Ephrem School were taken in buses to Bensalem High School, where the Red Cross set up a temporary shelter. Two nearby strip shopping malls, an over-55 community, and a number of houses also were evacuated.
Between 1,500 and 2,000 people were displaced within a quarter-mile to half-mile radius of the rupture. No injuries were reported.
Residents were allowed to return to their homes by late afternoon, but some will remain without gas service until today.
"Everything's under control," said Lt. P.J. Campellone of the Bensalem Police Department.
The usual pressure inside the main is 60 to 70 pounds per square inch, said Bill Brady, Peco Energy Co.'s county affairs manager for Bucks County. When it ruptured, the release of gas was so loud that witnesses compared it to the noise of a volcano, the roar of an aircraft, and a loud, constant screech.
"When I first heard it, it sounded like a jet plane was on top of the house," said Garret Fein, 11, of Woodsview Drive, who was home sick from school. He called his mother, Maggie, who rushed home from her job at nearby Valley Elementary School to what she described as a deafening sound.
"It was so loud that the state police were here, and they wondered why we weren't evacuated," Maggie Fein said after the pressure had been reduced in the line, lowering the sound somewhat.
At one point, Fein said, she stood on her deck holding up her telephone so that absent neighbors could hear for themselves.
The smell of gas could also be detected at spots miles from the rupture.
Peco spokesman Fred Maher said the utility had no reports of gas collecting dangerously in any structures. He said the evacuation decisions by local officials "were just a precaution."
For parents of children at St. Ephrem, it was a laudable precaution.
