Beaver County officials say an early morning methane gas pipeline explosion in Pennsylvania destroyed one home and prompted an evacuation of others.
The blast in Center Township was reported shortly before 5 a.m. Monday. Officials say a home, two garages and several vehicles were destroyed by fires stemming from the explosion.
No injuries have been reported and crews were able to move several horses to safety.
The community of Center Township is located roughly 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Witnesses reported hearing a loud boom and seeing an orange glow fill the sky.
The scene this am in Beaver County from Chuck Belczyk, as he was evacuating from his house pic.twitter.com/09oRu5lxAa
Pipeline owner Energy Transfer Partners says the valves to the pipeline were shut off and the fire was out by 7 a.m.
The 100-mile pipeline, known at the Revolution line, began operating earlier this month. It was built to supply the company’s Rover pipeline and Mariner East 2 lines.
About 25 to 30 homes were evacuated as a precaution. The Central Valley school district canceled classes. Interstate 376 was closed due to danger from falling power lines.
In June, a newly-built TransCanada natural gas pipeline exploded near Moundsville, West Virginia. No injuries or damage to private property were reported, but a fireball burned for several hours after an 83-foot section of the pipeline burst into flames, releasing more than $430,000 worth of natural gas. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said shifting land likely triggered the explosion of the Leach Xpress pipeline.
State regulators are fining the operators of the natural gas Rover Pipeline more than $430,000 for water pollution violations.
The state Department of Environmental Protection announced Tuesday that Rover Pipeline LLC, which is owned by Energy Transfer Partners, violated its permit and state laws on multiple occasions.
The 713-mile pipeline is 99 percent completed, according to the company. Ultimately, the pipeline will be used to transport more than three billion cubic feet of natural gas daily from processing plants in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
DEP says inspections by the agency over the course of a year beginning in April 2017 revealed pipeline operators failed to maintain erosion controls, improperly installed silt fences and other perimeter controls. The company also abandoned trash and debris during construction of the pipeline.
In total, the company received 18 violation notices and two cease-and-desist orders from DEP, according to the consent decree made public this week.
Angie Rosser, executive director of West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said many of the things the Rover Pipeline was cited for were repeated violations.
“It’s just like the message wasn’t getting across,” she asid. “I’m glad to see the DEP out there frequently and scrutinizing this closely, but it’s frustrating and insulting, I think, that this company just kept causing problems.”
As a result of the violations, many streams were flooded with dirt and debris. According to the consent decree, the company has agreed to immediately take measures to comply. The public comment period on the agreement is open until July 13.
Boordering western Pennsylvania, the landscape of eastern Ohio is changing, literally. Stretches of hillsides are being cleared of trees, to make way for well pads and pipelines.
The oil and gas industry is starting to take a front seat in what’s traditionally been rural coal country. As in Pennsylvania, some people are excited about the new industry. But others are concerned that there’s not enough regulation in place to protect waterways, and other aspects of the environment, from potential harm.
In rural Belmont County, commissioner President Mark Thomas remembers riding his bike on what are called coal gobs. “It’s the waste from the coal,” Thomas explains. “They started dumping and they started dumping and dumping, and next thing you know have a hill.” The coal waste came from two mines owned by Murray Energy. The mines sit along the banks of Captina Creek, a watershed the feeds directly into the Ohio River. The region, around where Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia meet, is called the Appalachian Coal Basin, and it’s considered to one of the largest coal fields in the country.
By the late 1970s, Murray Energy’s coal mines had left the water quality in Captina Creek so bad that large sections of it were declared dead. Local citizens mounted an effort to clean up the stream and, with help from the coal companies, removed the gob piles from its banks.
Today, Captina is considered one the cleanest streams that feeds into the Ohio. People swim and fish in it. Abbey Hayward, Captina Creek Watershed Coordinator at the Belmont County Soil and Water Conservation District, keeps an eye on the rare Eastern Hellbender salamander that lives here. “That species in particular is sensitive to clear water,” she says. “They need clearer water because they breathe through their skin.”
Hayward moved to this area late last year to keep watch over the creek. She didn’t really know anything about mining. Her second day on the job, there was a meeting of area residents, environmental groups, and coal companies to talk about the creek.
“That was impressive to me,” Hayward recalls. “Because I was like, they do work together? This is going to be great; I have people helping!”
Credit Julie Grant / Allegheny Front
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Allegheny Front
Abbey Hayward, a watershed coordinator in Belmont County, says she gets calls everyday from people concerned about pipelines being built near their homes.
But Hayward soon noticed drilling rigs on the hillsides, a sign of energy companies fracking for natural gas. Even though no one in her office, nor the Captina Creek Watershed Action Plan, had mentioned fracking, she started to understand how quickly the industry was moving in to Belmont County.
Then last spring, she started getting flooded with phone calls about pipelines. “We get calls all the time, and they’re increasing,” she says. “It’s, ‘Somebody’s cutting these trees down. And, ‘Somebody’s doing something in this creek,’ and we don’t know what’s going on.”
Energy companies need pipelines to connect their frack wells with the wider energy distribution system. But they aren’t necessarily informing local offices, like Hayward’s, about what they’re doing. “Some people are very understanding, because they’ve been calling 15 different offices trying to get an answer. And I’ve had some landowners who are very upset, because they have somebody doing work in their back 40, encroaching on their water supply,” Hayward says.
Hayward tries to track things down, but it’s different than calling the local coal company, where the people who work there also live in the community. There are at least a dozen pipeline companies building here, from places like Oklahoma, Texas, Alberta, Canada. “You don’t get a lot of feedback,” Hayward says. “You try to contact the right person, and there’s just so many people. And they move so fast because they have deadlines. Do I talk to the environmental representative? Do I talk to a land man?…. I don’t know who to go to.”
This is especially concerning to her considering what’s happened with the Rover pipeline, a 700 mile natural gas transmission line being built from West Virginia, through Ohio, and into Michigan. Rover has already been cited by Ohio regulators 13 times, and spilled more than 2 million gallons of diesel-laced drilling mud into a pristine Ohio wetland near a municipal water supply.
Over the summer, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stepped in to halt Rover’s construction at Captina Creek and elsewhere.
“The known unknown of the pipeline industry”
Ted Auch, who collects data about the oil and gas industry in Ohio for a non-profit called Fractracker, doesn’t worry as much about spills by the big transmission lines, like Rover.
“Those get reported most of the time, and they get quite a bit of media coverage,” he says. “What I worry about are these gathering lines.”
Gathering pipelines connect drilling well pads to the larger gas distribution system, and Auch doesn’t think there’s enough information about their routes to regulate them properly. He calls them “the known unknown of the pipeline industry.“
EXPLORE: FracTracker’s Oil & Gas Development Map
Ohio and Pennsylvania are among the states with the most local gathering lines in the U.S. According to a report from the American Petroleum Institute, there are about 24,000 miles of these lines in Ohio alone. When he talks with county officials, Auch says they know where pipelines cross county and state roads, “But in between there we have no idea what it’s doing…that’s 95-percent of the pipeline.”
Pipelines over a certain size need to be certified by the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. If a pipeline builder plans to cross a creek or other waterway, and uses a method that will impact the water, it also needs a state certification.
According to data by the Ohio EPA, the state has issued more than thirty of these stream and wetland crossing certificates for pipeline projects in Belmont County in the past three years.
But when it comes to siting those smaller gathering lines, the state says local zoning authorities are in charge. Belmont County Commission President Mark Thomas says his county, like many in rural Ohio, don’t have zoning rules. “The county has no teeth as far as regulations,” he says.
Credit Liza Butler
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A pipeline crossing Captina Creek.
Thomas says he has some concerns with how quickly fracking and pipelines are moving into his region. “Are these industries regulated, as was coal? Is it safer? What’s it going to do to the environment?,” he wonders. “The best we can do is look to the state.”
As the coal economy fades, Thomas weighs those risks with the benefits. He’s convinced the oil and gas industry will help this region reinvent itself after coal, long-term. A chemical company based in Thailand has purchased property in Belmont County, along the Ohio River, and is expected to announce by the end of the year ifit will build a multi-billion dollar ethane cracker. Similar to the Shell plant under construction in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, it would use the natural gas from fracking to create the building blocks for plastic. Thomas believes it could make natural gas the next job-creator in this region.
Abbey Hayward has no intention of trying to stop the pipeline. Still, she doesn’t like seeing construction equipment sitting right in Captina Creek, and she had no authority to find out more about it. “They have tight deadlines, and somebody is paying them a lot of money and they’re paying people, and I’m just somebody who’s trying to keep a creek nice,” she says.
Top photo: In May, workers clean up a 2 million gallon spill of drilling mud by Energy Transfer into a pristine wetland in Stark County, Ohio while building its Rover pipeline that will run from West Virginia to Michigan. The federal government shut down construction while the company makes improvements. Photo: Ohio EPA
Ohio’s environmental regulators have more than doubled the proposed fines against a company building a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to Michigan, saying Wednesday the two sides are at an impasse.
The fines now stand at $2.3 million and stem from what the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency says are numerous water and air pollution violations during construction of the $4.2 billion Rover Pipeline.
The twin pipelines are being built across Ohio to carry natural gas from Appalachian shale fields to Canada and states in the Midwest and the South.
Dallas-based developer Energy Transfer Partners, which also was behind the Dakota Access oil pipeline, has resisted attempts at resolving the fines, said Craig Butler, director of Ohio’s Environmental Protection Agency.
Butler said he is now asking the state’s attorney general to get involved.
Energy Transfer Partners said it will continue to work with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to meet its requirements.
The federal commission that oversees gas pipelines this week gave the company the approval to restart drilling operations. New drilling on unfinished sections had been halted after 2 million gallons (7.6 million liters) of drilling mud seeped into a wetland in the spring.
Energy Transfer Partners spokeswoman Alexis Daniel said the project now is expected to be completed and operating by the end of March.
The head of the Ohio EPA said the pipeline company doesn’t think the state has authority to impose regulations because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission already gave the company approval on the project.
“That really is the heart of the matter,” Butler said.
The developer has complied with orders to begin plans to clean up and restore wetlands that were coated with drilling mud, remove mud contaminated with diesel fuel from two quarries and monitor water wells near those sites, Butler said.
But he said the company is refusing the state’s directive to obtain storm water pollution permits.
Ohio’s environmental regulators and farmers say there have been problems with flooded fields since construction crews began laying pipe in March to meet the company’s initial plan of finishing the project by November.
State environmental authorities lifted their order halting Rover Pipeline construction on two segments where it found permit violations damaging streams in northern West Virginia.
Inspectors in April, May, June and July found erosion-control failures that left sediment deposits in creeks and streams.
The Department of Environmental Protection ordered Rover Pipeline LLC on July 17 to stop.
The DEP says inspections Wednesday show permit violations were corrected.
One segment extends 36 miles from Ohio through Tyler and Wetzel counties to a compressor station at Sherwood in Doddridge County.
Another runs for six miles through Doddridge County.
Construction wasn’t halted on two other West Virginia segments.
The 700-mile Rover Pipeline will carry natural gas from shale deposits in West Virginia and Pennsylvania across Ohio and into Michigan.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection issued a cease and desist order to Rover Pipeline citing permit violations in Doddridge and Tyler counties.
The state’s regulatory agency says the company failed to properly install and maintain erosion control devices. The DEP also says the company failed to control pollutants in stormwater discharges. DEP inspectors observed and documented these violations around compressor sites and along pipelines in April, May, June and July of this year.
As a result several roads and streams have been impaired. Rover Pipeline LLC was ordered to stop all development and has 20 days to respond with plans to address violations. Company officials say construction at sites noted by the DEP has stopped while issues there are resolved, but that work continues in Hancock and Marshall counties.
The $4.2 billion pipeline, which was approved and began construction early this year, is designed to carry shale gas from this region to northeast and Canadian markets.
