The Town of Quantico is bounded by Marine Corps land and the Potomac, the town that cannot grow. Family housing aboard the base, 1,137 homes, is owned, managed and maintained by Liberty Military Housing, so a boiler on base goes to Liberty. Our boiler work in Quantico is in the Town, where the Census counts 310 occupied homes, 260 of them rented, and 50 owned.
Those 50 owner homes run old, the typical one built in 1950. Gas heats close to six in ten of them and oil close to one in five, with electricity the rest, and close to half are townhouses. A count this small carries wide margins, but the picture is a gas boiler in an older row house, venting up a chimney. Any oil boilers in town are outside our work.
In the Town, Prince William County’s Building Development Division issues building and trade permits, and the Town handles its own zoning approvals. A boiler that fails mid-winter can be replaced before the paperwork, provided the Division has the application by close of the next working day. Water comes from the Town’s own small system, which buys treated surface water from the base’s Mainside system.
The Marine Corps air station’s weather record, 1.6 miles south-southwest at the river’s edge, averages about 4,000 heating degree days, a January low of 28, and a couple of nights a year at 10 or colder. That’s a mild winter by Northern Virginia standards, which lets a tired boiler limp along until a hard cold night finds it out.