San Bruno, CA – Aging Gas Pipe At Risk of Explosion Nationwide

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     Firemen battle flames after a massive faulty gas pipe explosion and fire in San Bruno, close to San Francisco, late 09 September 2010. EPASan Bruno, CA – An ominous theme has emerged from the wreckage of a deadly pipeline explosion in California: There are thousands of pipes just like it nationwide.

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    Utilities have been under pressure for years to better inspect and replace aging gas pipes — many of them laid years before the suburbs expanded over them and now are at risk of leaking or erupting.

    But the effort has fallen short. Critics say the regulatory system is ripe for problems because the government leaves it up to the companies to do inspections, and utilities are reluctant to spend the money necessary to properly fix and replace decrepit pipelines.

    “If this was the FAA and air travel we were talking about, I wouldn’t get on a plane,” said Rick Kessler, a former congressional staffer specializing in pipeline safety issues who now works for the Pipeline Safety Trust, an advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash.

    Investigators are still trying to figure out how the pipeline in San Bruno ruptured and ignited a gigantic fireball that torched one home after another in the neighborhood, killing at least four people. Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the pipeline’s owner, said Monday it has set aside up to $100 million to help residents recover.

    Experts say the California disaster epitomizes the risks that communities face with old gas lines. The pipe was more than 50 years old — right around the life expectancy for steel pipes. It was part of a transmission line that had an “unacceptably high” risk of failure. And it was in a densely populated area.

    The blast was the latest warning sign in a series of deadly infrastructure failures in recent years, including a bridge collapse in Minneapolis, a steam pipe explosion that tore open a Manhattan street in 2007. The steam pipe that ruptured was more than 80 years old.

    The section of pipeline that ruptured was built in 1956, back when the neighborhood contained only a handful of homes. It is a scenario that National Transportation Safety Board vice chairman Christopher Hart has seen play out throughout the nation, as suburbs have expanded.

    “That’s an issue we’re going to have to look on a bigger scale — situations in which pipes of some age were put in before the dense population arrived and now the dense population is right over the pipe,” he said.

    Thousands of pipelines nationwide fit the same bill, and they frequently experience mishaps. Federal officials have recorded 2,840 significant gas pipeline accidents since 1990, more than a third causing deaths and significant injuries.

    “In reality, there is a major pipeline incident every other day in this country,” said Carl Weimer, Pipeline Safety Trust’s executive director. “Luckily, most of them don’t happen in populated areas, but you still see too many failures to think something like this wasn’t going to happen sooner or later.”

    Congress passed a law in 2002 that required utilities for the first time to inspect pipelines that run through heavily-populated areas. In the first five years, more than 3,000 problems were identified — a figure Weimer said underscores the precarious pipeline system.

    Footage of San Bruno, California gas pipe fire from the Channel 7 helicopter.

    Even when inspections are done and problems found, Kessler said, there is no requirement for companies to say if or what kind of repairs were made. And Weimer added industry lobbyists have since pushed to relax that provision of the law so inspections could occur once a decade or once every 15 years.

    Other critics complain that the pipeline plans are drafted in secret with little opportunity for the public to provide speak out about the process.

    The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration is the federal regulatory arm that enforces rules for the safe operation of the nation’s pipeline system. State public utility agencies have adopted the federal rules and carry out inspections and enforcement.

    But the system often relies on the pipeline operators like Pacific Gas and Electric to survey their own gas lines and to decide which pipelines are high-risk.

    The American Gas Association disputes the notion that it cuts any corners and says the industry is subjected to stringent state and federal regulations.

    “Safety is unequivocally the No. 1 priority for the natural gas transmission and distribution industry and always will be,” spokesman Chris Hogan said. “The industry spends billions each year to ensure the safety and reliability of the natural gas infrastructure.

    The challenge of ensuring pipeline safety is compounded by the sheer enormity of the nation’s natural gas network. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration says the U.S. has more than 2 million miles of pipelines — enough to circle the earth about 100 times.
    The remains of burned vehicles and homes are seen near the site of a natural gas explosion in San Bruno, California September 11, 2010.
REUTERS/Noah Berger/Pool
    The agency has only about 100 federal inspectors nationwide to ensure compliance, meaning there is no guarantee violators will be caught. “When you look at two-and-a-half million miles of pipeline with 100 inspectors, it’s not reassuring,” Weimer said. “To a grand degree the industry inspects and polices themselves.”

    Potential safety threats have grown as the pipeline network has expanded and age takes its toll on existing infrastructure. More than 60 percent of the nation’s gas transmission lines are 40 years old or older.

    Most of them are made of steel, with older varieties prone to corrosion. The more problematic pipes are made of cast-iron. A few places in Pennsylvania still had wooden gas pipes as of last year, according to officials there.

    Pipelines in heavily populated locations like San Bruno fall into a category the industry refers to as “high consequence areas.”

    Those areas contain about 7 percent of the 300,000 miles of gas transmission lines in the country, or roughly 21,000 miles of pipeline. The category has nothing to do with the safety of pipelines, and was created to put the greatest emphasis on the most populous regions.

    Industry watchdogs have criticized utilities for not being willing to spend the money necessary to avoid explosions like the one in California. The cost to replace lengthy stretches of pipelines can exceed $30 million.

    “They will prioritize and put off work to maintain their level of earnings,” said Bill Marcus, an attorney whose firm consults nationally with consumer protection agencies and nonprofits on gas rate cases. “To some extent that’s not bad, but it is concerning when those decisions endanger public health or the environment.”

    PG&E said it has spent more than $100 million to improve its gas system in recent years, and routinely surveys its 5,724 miles of transmission and 42,142 miles of distribution lines for leaks. The utility speeded up surveys of its distribution lines in 2008 and expects to have completed checks in December, it said.

    PG&E President Chris Johns said the pipe that ruptured was inspected twice in the past year — once for corrosion and once for leaks — and the checks turned up no problems.

    A section of pipe connected to the line that exploded was built in 1948, and flagged as a problem by the PG&E in a memo. PG&E submitted paperwork to regulators that said the section was within “the top 100 highest risk line sections” in the utility’s service territory, the documents show.

    The fact that it’s in a heavily populated area that didn’t exist when the pipe was built is emblematic of a bigger problem nationwide, experts say.

    “People have been waiting for a while for this type of disaster to happen because of expanded construction near pipeline right of ways without adequate prevention,” said Paul Blackburn, a public interest lawyer in Vermillion, S.D.


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    7 Comments
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    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    13 years ago

    The gas distribution utilities and interstate pipeline companies would be delighted to replace all of these pipes. They make thier profit as a percentage of the value of their installed assets and new pipes would add tens of billions of dollars to their “rate base”. The only problem is that all the politicans and customers who want these new or upgraded pipelines don’t want to pay for them in utility rates. Well, maybe if we have a few more of these tragedies they will change their minds and give the utilities approval to make the needed capital investments.

    13 years ago

    but the alternative is buying it from the arabs

    Anonymous
    Anonymous
    13 years ago

    Rely to #2

    Do you think thats funny or don’t you realize that we don’t get a single Btu of natural gas from “the arabs”. We produce the large percentage of our natural gas in the U.S. or import it from Mexico and Canada. A small amount of LNG is imported from the Caribbean and Latin American. NONE comes from the arab countries.

    Anon Ibid Opcit
    Anon Ibid Opcit
    13 years ago

    Our infrastructure is aging and decrepit. Much of it dates back to the fifties or the New Deal days. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers it would take about $1.8 trillion to fix it, the amount we spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as of two years ago.

    enlightened-yid
    enlightened-yid
    13 years ago

    I’m surprised no-one here has blamed Obama for this yet… Give it 40 more years when most of our New Deal era and 1960s infrastructure: bridges, dams, interstate highways, electric grids and old rail will be reaching their maximum design life expectancy and we won’t have the trillions nor the technical capabilities to replace them. California is looking to pay China 60 Billion dollars to build them a high speed rail because there isn’t a single company in the U.S. that can build a modern train. We already rely on foreign engineering firms to design and build our bridges and tunnels. The Indians and Chinese will become wealthy if we will have the monies to fix our crumbling nation.

    charliehall
    charliehall
    13 years ago

    Well said comments 1, 4, 5, and 6. We desparately need to improve America’s infrastructure and it will cost money — lots of it. We will need to pay more for energy and transportation and we will also need to pay higher taxes if we don’t want to become a third world country.