The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has notified Equitrans Midstream that it’s required to repair or replace damaged sections of pipe.
A federal agency has told the builder of the Mountain Valley Pipeline that the pipe used in the project’s construction must be treated to resist corrosion.
As the $6.6 billion, 300-mile natural gas pipeline has been caught in a series of legal challenges, large sections of pipe have been left exposed to the elements.
Exposure to sunlight degrades the protective coating on the pipe that prevents corrosion.
The pipeline’s opponents have been calling on Equitrans Midstream to address the issue.
A federal appeals court last week dismissed two lawsuits against the project, eliminating a significant legal barrier to its completion but dealing a setback to its opponents.
On the morning of April 29, a natural gas transmission line exploded in a field in Salem Township in western Pennsylvania. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape, burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius and threw a 25-foot section of the 30-inch steel pipeline 100 feet away. At the time of the explosion, a 26-year-old man was in his house, a few hundred feet away. He was badly burned, and his home destroyed.
When local fire chief Bob Rosatti arrived at the scene, the flames were so hot, he had to stay in his truck.
“They were massive—I would say 300 feet at the least,” Rosatti says. “That was the biggest fireball I’d ever seen in my life. Thank god it was in a rural area. It could have been a lot worse if it had been in a more populous area.”
Investigators think external corrosion on the pipe is to blame for the blast. But they are still poring over a decade’s worth of pipe inspection reports to determine exactly what caused it.
The explosion comes as the federal government is undertaking a new effort to make gas transmission pipelines safer. It has become an even more urgent issue now that the country is building more pipelines, especially in the Northeast. The fracking boom in the Marcellus and Utica shales is a big reason for that. The Department of Energy predicts Pennsylvania and Ohio will nearly double their natural gas production by 2030.
These natural gas transmission lines carry gas at high pressure across long distances. Currently, there are 300,000 miles of these lines in the U.S. And many residents who live in the path of these new pipelines are asking if they should be worried about accidents like the one in Salem Township.
“They need to find a safe way to move gas,” says Lisa Segina, a Salem Township resident who leases her land for $20 a year to a company that stores gas under her property. “I understand we need it, we need energy. But there are safe ways to do it.”
Credit Reid Frazier / Allegheny Front
/
Allegheny Front
Two men walk the scene of a natural gas transmission line explosion in western Pennsylvania, April 29, 2016. The blast was so powerful it ripped a 12-foot crater into the landscape and burned a section of the field with a quarter-mile radius.
Segina says what upsets her the most is how long it took for the company to shut off the gas in the pipeline after the explosion.
“It was active for almost 55 minutes before they were able to shut it down, because someone had to drive 15 miles to shut this valve off,” she says.
Officials from Spectra Energy, the company operating the pipeline, declined to be interviewed for this story. But in an email, company spokesman Creighton Welch says the industry standard is to shut off pipelines within an hour of any incident. He says the company also performed all federally mandated inspections—including an in-line inspection (ILI) in 2012, which tests the strength of the pipe from the inside. According to Welch, that inspection “revealed no areas requiring repair or remediation before the next inspection.”
Overall, pipelines have steadily gotten safer over the past few decades—though more than 300 serious pipeline incidents have resulted in 132 deaths in the past decade, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Suburban Pittsburgh resident Rob Brown is among those who are uncomfortable with his home’s proximity to a pipeline. Brown lives in Murraysville, where Dominion Transmission wants to put a large natural gas pipeline through his property, about 200 feet from his back door. When Brown first heard about the pipeline, he thought about moving. News of the explosion jolted him—and raised the alarm for people in his suburban neighborhood.
“Something like that happens to a neighbor, the word spreads,” Brown says. “It’s not safe. There’s a definitely a risk.”
But Frank Mack, a spokesperson for Dominion Transmission, says that—by the numbers—moving natural gas via pipeline is the safest form of energy transportation in the U.S.—far safer than transporting other fuels by rail or truck. He says the company uses various methods, including aerial and ground inspections, to keep its pipelines safe.
Earlier this year, the federal agency in charge of pipeline safety proposed new rules that add more protections for areas like Brown’s Murraysville neighborhood. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) proposed the rules in response to a 2010 explosion in San Bruno, California that killed eight people. A draft of the new rule noted that “the nation’s existing, and in many cases, aging, pipeline system is facing the full brunt of this dramatic increase in natural gas supply and the shifting energy needs of the country.”
As the rules are currently written, pipelines in densely populated areas undergo the most stringent safety inspections. But the agency is proposing to extend some of these protections to suburban and less-populated areas. PHMSA also wants to add more pressure testing for older lines. A separate rule could mandate increased use of automatic shutoff valves, which would have stopped the Salem Township fire sooner.
PHMSA did not respond to interview requests for this story. But Stacey Gerard, the former safety chief at the agency, says the rate at which the regulators can tighten safety rules for pipelines is slow. She says any new rule must pass a cost-benefit analysis. If the projected costs of imposing the rule outweigh the benefits, the government can’t pass it—even if those benefits include avoiding property damage, injuries and deaths.
For example, a rule that saves a human life must yield a benefit of $9.4 million—an amount determined by a federal government metric known as the “value of a statistical life.” Gerard says that hampers the ability of the agency to impose safety regulations.
“The societal benefit of people being able to sleep at night is hard to quantify,” Gerard says. “We’re not going to get all the improvements we’d like. There are actions the agency would like to make that, if they can’t come out with a positive [cost-benefit] analysis, it won’t make it into the rule.”
Further complicating matters is the fact that most pipelines were built in places that once were rural but are now seeing increased development. Today, more than 12,000 schools in the U.S. are within 1,000 feet of a major natural gas transmission line.
Gerard says decisions about where to site pipelines are often made at the local level, which makes the job of federal safety officers even harder.
“You have the challenge of getting the energy to the people who need it. And for the foreseeable future, we’re a fossil fuel-oriented economy,” she says. “For at least the next 20 years, we have to figure out how to do this safely.”
This story is part of The Allegheny Front’s series Follow the Pipeline, which explores the health and environmental impacts of the region’s expanding natural gas infrastructure. Data visualizations by Dave Mistich, West Virginia Public Broadcasting.
In the House chamber Tuesday, Delegates approved an amendment to a pipeline safety bill proposed on behalf of the governor.
House Bill 4323 was on second reading in the House, also known as the amendment phase. The bill requires pipeline operators to report an accident or emergency at their facility to the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management within 15 minutes or face a fine of up to $50,000.
Delegates considered one change on the House floor. House Energy Chairman Woody Ireland proposed the amendment to the full chamber. His change adjusts the definition of a pipeline facility, exempting pipelines that are 4 inches in diameter or less and service a farm or residence.
“The reason for that was to try to get the thing to really address issues that were high risk and really did impact folks’ safety,” Ireland said, “Now, the governor’s bill as it was proposed talked about all pipelines, and this was just a clarification of what a pipeline facility really meant.”
Ireland agrees that pipelines serving the oil and gas industry should be held to the reporting requirements, but small pipelines on personal property should not face such steep penalties. The fines for the failure to report an accident within 15 minutes range from $2,500 to $50,000.
Ireland’s amendment was passed unanimously by members in the House.
Some citizens interested in the bill, however, have voiced concerns over the $50,000 penalty, suggesting it’s actually too small and pipeline operators will be able to pay off any emergency incident easily.
Ireland disagrees.
“That’s a pretty stiff penalty, and it’s consistent with the other penalties that DEP have leveled on other commercial enterprises such as chemical industry and so forth. So $50,000 is pretty stiff, and it’s not something people are going to take lightly,” he said.
Ireland says the industry is also struggling financially because of the decline in natural gas prices and the penalty will be more than enough of an incentive to report the incident.
House Bill 4323 will be up for a final vote in the House chamber Wednesday.
Federal investigators have determined the cause of a Colombia Gas Transmission pipeline explosion in West Virginia in December 2012.
In a report released Monday, the National Transportation Safety Board said the explosion was caused by external corrosion and a lack of recent inspections. The agency said the corrosion could have been discovered by the pipeline operator.
On December 11, 2012, a 20-inch high-pressure natural gas pipeline running through Sissonville, West Virginia ruptured with so much force that a 20-foot-long segment of pipe was thrown more than 40 feet from where it had been buried.
The released natural gas ignited and burned so hot that it charred 800 feet of roadway along nearby Interstate 77, destroyed three homes, and melted the siding on houses hundreds of feet from the rupture site.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, along with Senator Joe Manchin and Congressman Nick Rahall, today announced more than $697,000 in federal funding for pipeline safety efforts in West Virginia.
“West Virginia’s booming natural gas industry relies heavily on pipelines, which means they must be safe, reliable and durable. As Commerce Committee Chairman, I’ve worked hard to make sure there is oversight of our pipeline operations to prevent accidents that could harm both our communities and our economy,” said Rockefeller.
“The importance of establishing the strongest possible safeguards against future pipeline explosions was never more apparent than after the devastating explosion in Sissonville last December. This funding is an important investment in our work to make pipelines as safe and secure as possible.”
“In West Virginia, investing in natural gas is important for job creation and economic growth, but the bottom line is that we need to make sure drilling is done safely,” Manchin said.
“We are fortunate that no one was seriously injured last year when a gas pipeline ruptured in Sissonville. This incident proved that we constantly need to be prepared and safety should always be our top priority. This funding will help ensure the pipelines are being operated safely, maintained properly and inspected regularly so that incidents like the rupture last December don’t happen again.”
“It would be pennywise but pound foolish not to invest in pipeline safety,” said Rahall, top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee with jurisdiction over PHMSA.
“Our State just witnessed the consequences of pipeline failure and a strong federal partnership is a good insurance policy against future failures. Constant maintenance and consistent inspections are key ingredients in keeping our families, businesses and industries, our infrastructure and communities safe.”
The funding comes from the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), and was awarded to two agencies in West Virginia in the following amounts:
$496,943 – West Virginia Public Service Commission – The Commission received this funding through PHMSA’s fiscal year 2013 Pipeline Safety Base Grant program as a reimbursement to help alleviate the cost of the State’s pipeline safety programs.
$200,717 – West Virginia Emergency Response Commission – The Commission received this funding through PHMSA’s Hazardous Materials Emergency Preparedness (HMEP) Grant Program, which gives States assistance in performing hazardous materials response duties.
As Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Senator Rockefeller is in charge of Congressional oversight of pipeline safety. Rockefeller authored legislation that was signed into law in 2011 to strengthen pipeline safety. He also held a field hearing on pipeline safety in Charleston earlier this year in response to the pipeline explosion in Sissonville, West Virginia on December 11, 2012. The Commerce Committee has held four hearings on pipeline safety in the past three years.
