Pipeline Safety - Who's Next?

[John Mayo]

Reprinted with permission of The Texas Observer.


The Fire Down Below
As the North Texas gas-drilling frenzy continues, residents fight for
the truth--and brace for the worst.
by Forrest Wilder

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Published on: Thursday, December 02, 2010
Mary Kelleher's Fort Worth home is 65 feet from an off-the-books gas
pipeline. photo by Jen Reel Mary Kelleher's Fort Worth home is 65 feet
from an off-the-books gas pipeline.

In June 2009, visions of fireballs and impact craters began to dance
grimly in Mary Kelleher’s head. She’d gotten word that a giant, high-
pressure natural gas pipeline was coming to her little piece of heaven
in the Trinity River bottomlands of east Fort Worth—part of an
unprecedented gas-drilling boom in North Texas. Enterprise Products
Partners, one of the dozens of drilling outfits capitalizing on the
frenzy, would be building a 30-inch transmission pipe under a vacant
lot next door to Kelleher, a few dozen feet from her home. The blast
radius for a pipeline of its size and pressure, she discovered, was
about 700 feet.

“I know this is going to sound strange,” Kelleher says, “but I asked
them to put it on my property because, if that was the case, at least
if I blew up my family would get compensation for it.”

Kelleher, a supervisor in Tarrant County’s juvenile courts, had just
finished building her dream home, a country-style brick affair just
above the river’s floodplain. An inveterate animal lover, she has 12
acres overrun with goats, donkeys, ducks, llamas, chickens and nine
rambunctious dogs—a rustic farmette in the middle of the bustling
metroplex. Like many in Fort Worth, she’d already had natural gas
wells cropping up around her place, and the paltry royalty checks—$200
total, so far—had done little to assuage her fears over air pollution
from the wells and compressor stations. She was also worried, even
before the pipeline went in, about the “sulfurish” taste of her tap
water, which she attributes to the fluids used to extract the gas.

Kelleher has plenty of company: More than 14,000 wells have been
drilled in North Texas’ Barnett Shale, and upwards of 1,200 in Fort
Worth alone. They’re in backyards, cemeteries, church grounds, parks
and university campuses. In the early days—all of six or seven years
ago—it seemed like a gift. Natural gas producers were flush with
profits, and many citizens thought their biggest headache would be
figuring out how to wring the fattest royalty check from the
companies.

The backlash didn’t take long to commence. At first, when the wells
began popping up, the complaints were of a “not in my backyard” nature—
noise and commotion from the construction and the big trucks. Then
residents like Kelleher began to ask whether their air and water were
being fouled. (A growing body of evidence, not yet conclusive, says
that they are.) Now the next phase of the backlash is in full gear.
All those wells, upwards of 6,000 eventually, necessitate pipelines
—“gathering” pipelines that move raw gas from wells to processing
plants, and larger transmission pipelines to move processed gas to far-
flung destinations across the state and country. Roughly one-quarter
of the pipelines have been built so far.

What’s happening in Fort Worth is something entirely new. The vast
majority of Texas’ 360,000 miles of pipeline, the most in the nation,
are located in rural areas, a safe distance from homes, schools and
businesses. It’s one thing to build high-pressure pipelines filled
with highly flammable gas in rural areas. It’s quite another to do so
in one of the country’s fastest-growing metro areas.

“Fort Worth is the first urban gas field in the nation,” says Jerry
Lodbill, a retired Fort Worth physicist and industry critic. This is
where the gas industry “has decided to develop their template for how
they’re going to attack urban areas,” Lodbill says. “We are the
first.”

Feeling like they’re part of a massive, highly flammable experiment is
scary enough for many residents. But a series of major gas-pipeline
explosions in the past year has focused increased attention on the
dangers of building a lightly regulated pipeline system beneath the
Metroplex.

Last November, an aging pipeline owned by El Paso Natural Gas blew up
on the edge of a residential subdivision near Bushland, west of
Amarillo, with the force of a magnitude 4.0 earthquake and
temperatures of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A column of flames soared
hundreds of feet in the air. A nearby home was incinerated, 150
residents were evacuated, and three people were injured, including a
15-year-old girl who was badly burned. “I don’t think any of us knew
we were sitting on a mini-nuclear weapon,” one resident told the
company at a packed community meeting after the explosion.

This June, two deadly accidents occurred on consecutive days in Texas.
First, workers drilling holes for new utility poles struck an
Enterprise pipeline near Cleburne, south of Fort Worth. Eyewitnesses
said it was like an earthquake. Flames from the fireball shot 300 feet
high, visible 20 miles away. James Neese, a contractor from Oklahoma,
was instantly killed. An investigation by the Texas Railroad
Commission found that the company had failed to mark the pipeline as
required, so Neese and the other workers had no way of knowing it was
there. The nearest marked line was a quarter-mile away. The state
offered to settle with Enterprise for $120,000.

Texas_Explosion

Top: Cleburn pipeline explosion, courtesy Dallas Morning News

Bottom: San Bruno, Calif. gas line explosion

ca-explosion



A day later, construction workers operating a bulldozer hit another
unmarked pipeline—this one owned by a company called DCP Midstream—
near the tiny Panhandle town of Darrouzett. The fiery blast killed two
men and seriously injured another.

Those blow-ups occurred in relatively unpopulated areas. But late this
summer, North Texans like Kelleher saw on their TV screens a
horrifying vision of what could happen in the Metroplex. On Sept. 9, a
pipeline in a residential area of San Bruno, Calif., ruptured and
ignited with the force of a space-shuttle launch. Eight were killed,
more than 50 injured, and dozens of homes torched. Federal
investigators are still searching for the cause.

That string of disasters demonstrated how catastrophic urban pipeline
explosions can be. As the Barnett Shale frenzy continues, the
accidents have also spurred criticism of a shoddy regulatory system
riddled with loopholes—and an industry that increasingly puts profits
over safe operations. Lodbill, like other critics, says state
regulators and Fort Worth officials have been slow to recognize the
potential threat, much less quantify it. He estimates, based on the
frequency of pipeline accidents from 2004 to 2007 in the Barnett
Shale, that once 5,600 wells and their associated pipelines are built
in Fort Worth, “significant” incidents involving injuries, deaths or
major property damage could become a regular occurrence.

“It’s Statistics 101,” Lodbill says. “It’s going to happen.”



Like many of her neighbors, Mary Kelleher quickly learned there was
nothing she could do to stop the pipeline next to her house—or to get
it moved. It was almost impossible to get basic information about the
project. Decades ago, the Texas Legislature gave private pipeline
owners extraordinary power of eminent domain: They have the right to
seize property and lay pipeline wherever they like, with citizens, and
state and local governments having little or no say.

So Kelleher decided to monitor the pipeline construction, a “comedy of
errors” that began in February. First, contractors hired to dig the
pipeline trench ran over some of her ducks and leaked diesel into her
pond. Then they uncovered an old dump filled with sharp-edged
construction debris and failed to report it to state authorities, as
the law requires. Next, Enterprise built a large earthen “pad site”
next door for a metering station to service nearby wells, without
first getting a floodplain building permit from the city of Fort
Worth. When the remnants of Hurricane Hermine swept through in
September, floodwaters from the Trinity River rose higher and lingered
longer than ever before, drowning some of her animals and causing
thousands of dollars of property damage. When I visited her in
October, huge pools of stagnant water were still backed up on
Kelleher’s property. The city, that same month, threatened fines of
$2,000 a day on Enterprise until the company submitted proper
engineering studies, writing that the pad site “appears to have
obstructed the natural drainage pattern in the area.”

But the environmental impact was small potatoes compared to Kelleher’s
mounting worries about the pipeline that now runs 65 feet from her
bedroom window. To get basic information about where and what the
pipeline was supposed to be, Kelleher had to file an open-records
request with the Railroad Commission. The documents she eventually got
were hardly reassuring. For instance, a questionnaire Enterprise
filled out in order to get its operating permit lists the pipeline’s
wall thickness and pipe grade as “unknown.” The pipeline’s pressure is
listed as “to be determined.” That was good enough to get the Railroad
Commission’s approval.

But that’s just the beginning of this “comedy.” Based on an Observer
review, the maps of the pipeline’s route that the company submitted to
the Railroad Commission are wrong. They don’t show the line running by
Kelleher’s house at all. In November, trying to get to the bottom of
that mystery, Kelleher contacted the state’s “Call Before You Dig”
system—a federally mandated program that is the government’s primary
defense against accidents. By law, excavators have to call the
system’s 8-1-1 number before digging. Kelleher told the state she
planned on deepening her pond. By law, pipeline companies in the area
then have to come out and mark their pipes. Four local companies
responded, correctly, that they had no pipelines in the immediate
vicinity. But Enterprise, which had laid the pipes, did not come out
or respond in any way. (Enterprise did not return phone calls seeking
comment.)

“That’s just alarming and it’s probably more commonplace than we hope
to know,” says state Sen. Wendy Davis, a Fort Worth Democrat. “If you
don’t have inspectors out in the field making sure that things are
happening as they should be, who knows what’s happening.”

Kelleher has drawn her own conclusions. “The gas companies seem to be
allowed the discretion to do as they please without consequence. The
Railroad Commission has no teeth into holding them responsible for
their actions or lack of actions.

“Am I cracking up? It’s just not right. I made repairs to my chicken
coop and the city red-tagged me. Different rules apply to the gas
company. On more than one occasion city officials and government
officials have told me, ‘You don’t generate as much tax revenue as the
gas company.’”
Major Gas Transmission Pipeline Incidents in Texas 2002-2009 Source:
Office of Pipeline Safety

While North Texans fret, these are halcyon days for the natural-gas
business. About a decade ago, innovators in the industry pioneered a
new drilling technique called hydrofracturing—or “fracking”—in which
water and chemicals are injected deep underground to release gas from
tight rock formations. First used in the Barnett Shale, fracking has
unlocked trillions of cubic feet of unconventional natural gas, first
in North Texas and then in New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and West
Virginia. It’s spurred a bonanza for producers and been embraced by
politicians eager to chart a new direction for the nation’s aimless
energy policy.

What’s not to love? Gas, after all, burns much more cleanly than oil
or coal. Its carbon footprint is much smaller. Gas also comes
blessedly free of foreign entanglements. But in the rush to
capitalize, some longtime natural-gas insiders say that the once-staid
industry has taken a dangerous turn. Bill Fisher, a retired pipeline
executive in Forth Worth, is one of them. “This industry has
essentially been changed in the last 25 years,” he says. “It no longer
has a regulated mentality. It’s a go-go type mentality, a Wall Street
mentality. I’m afraid it’s changed to, ‘Let’s do it as fast as we can,
as cheap as we can.’”

Once, before a binge of deregulation in the ’80s and ’90s, companies
held onto their pipelines for decades, which created incentives to
ensure these valuable assets were built and maintained properly. “You
had a tradition in this country of pipelines being operated as
utilities,” Fisher says. “In a utility, you get your money back from
ratepayers, so safety should be your number-one goal.”

Nowadays pipelines are regularly built, sold and resold many times
over, “flipped” like overpriced homes during the lustiest days of the
housing market. The number of pipeline operators has skyrocketed. Many
specialize in gas production, not pipelines, but have created
subsidiaries that build and operate pipeline systems. Others are what
the big companies call “mom and pop” outfits, lightly capitalized fly-
by-nights trying to strike it rich in America’s great gas play.

While even critics will concede that pipelines are probably the safest
way to transport gas, they question the ability and willingness of the
regulators to keep up with the industry. The companies “operate how
the regulators make them operate,” says Fort Worth pipeline-safety
expert Don Deaver. And that’s problematic, he says, because the
Railroad Commission “does more to protect the pipeline companies than
the public.”

Ten years ago, when the Texas Railroad Commission was under Sunset
review—a once-a-decade, top-to-bottom review of state agencies—the
Sunset Advisory Committee recommended that the commission oversee
rural gathering lines. But legislators, loath to upturn the industry’s
campaign-cash gravy train, ignored that recommendation.

The upshot is that many gathering lines never have to be inspected,
nor are they required to have integrity management plans, a key tool
in preventing disasters. They also don’t have to be injected with an
odorant, which helps alert people to gas leaks. Yet many gathering
lines are identical in size and pressure—and, thus, potential danger—
to transmission lines, which are inspected.

In the long run, the gathering lines running under the Metroplex might
be even more dangerous than their transmission cousins. For one thing,
they’re more susceptible to corrosion because the gas they carry is
raw, containing corroding substances like water and salt. “They have
all kinds of internal corrosion problems,” says Deaver, who worked 33
years for Exxon Mobil and now serves as an expert witness for
plaintiffs in pipeline-safety lawsuits.

Jay Marcom can show you just how easy it is to hit a pipeline—and he
can also testify how hard it is to know where they’re located with any
certainty. A salty rancher, Marcom owns 1,600 acres an hour-and-a-half
west of the sprawling Metroplex. Eighteen months ago, he nicked an 8-
inch pipeline with a backhoe while digging a new culvert. The line was
buried only about an inch; though it was relatively small in
circumference, it carried about 1 million cubic feet of gas per day.
“I could have been a crispy critter,” Marcom laughs, pointing to where
he nicked the line.

As required by law, Marcom had duly informed the “Call Before You Dig”
hotline before he dug, and three pipeline companies had come out to
mark their lines. Two of them had lines nowhere near the site where
Marcom wanted to dig. The third, Ranger Gas, marked a line about 500
feet from the spot. To do so, the company men resorted to the ancient
technique of “witching,” using two pieces of metal. “When the metal
crossed, they said, ‘That’s where it is,’ ” Marcom says.

They were wrong. After his near-miss, Marcom hired a surveyor to plot
the pipeline’s route, trying to make sure he wouldn’t risk being blown
up. The surveyor studied records from the Railroad Commission, the
county and the company. None of them matched. “They basically forgot
where it was,” Marcom says. “Never knew where it was. It was off the
books.”

Railroad Commission records show that mismarked lines are hardly
unusual. Filings by pipeline operators frequently flag significant
discrepancies in the locations and mileage of pipeline systems. For
example, a May 2009 sheet lists 23 mapping errors in Barnett Shale
pipelines acquired by Cowtown Pipeline L.P. from Crosstex Energy
Services with notations such as “There [sic] pipe is not connected,
and in wrong spot according to CAD drawings.”

Deaver, the pipeline expert, says that where many gathering lines are
concerned, “they’re out there like the wild, wild West, unregulated,”
he said.

The Railroad Commission seems to have an official tolerance for
errors. In October, Brett Shipp of WFAA-TV in Dallas reported on an
internal commission rating system for maps submitted by pipeline
operators. “According to the Railroad Commission’s own guidelines, the
maps are considered ‘excellent’ if they are within 50 feet of being
accurate,” Shipp reported. “They are rated ‘good’ if they are within
301 to 500 feet of being accurate.”

That means the Ranger Gas marking on Marcom’s property, 500 feet from
where he dug his culvert, would get a “good” rating from the state.
Deaver says that’s “truly flabbergasting.” He points out that periodic
inspections of pipelines for leaks are often done by airplane. “You
cannot do a [leak] patrol … if you don’t know where your pipeline is.”

Although Railroad Commission spokeswoman Ramona Nye refused to grant
an interview to the Observer, she wrote in an email that the agency’s
“maps are not intended nor should they be used as a resource to find a
pipeline before digging as the law requires a call to 8-1-1 to notify
the One Call System of excavation plans.”

In the last decade, safety inspections of pipelines have decreased in
Texas. In 2001, there were 2,639 inspections; in 2009 there were 2,171—
a decrease of more than 17 percent even as more pipe went in the
ground. Texas spends less on pipeline safety per mile than Oklahoma
and Louisiana, also major gas-producing states. New Mexico spent more
than double in 2008 on pipeline safety, according to Railroad
Commission data.

The commission has been reluctant to fine companies for safety
violations. In 2008, for example, state inspectors identified more
than 2,400 pipeline safety violations but only assessed $43,000 in
fines—about $18 per violation.

On the other hand, the commission rolled out a damage prevention
program in 2008 that levies fines for mismarking pipelines or not
calling 8-1-1 before digging. Nye points out that more than three-
quarters of all pipeline incidents in Texas are caused by third
parties accidentally hitting pipelines. In 2010, the Railroad
Commission issued more than $1.5 million in fines.



History and a passing familiarity with the power of the oil and gas
industry in Texas will tell you it’s unlikely the Texas Legislature
will curtail the pipeline operators’ power to locate pipes anywhere
they like. But as pipelines encroach on populated parts of North
Texas, pressure is growing on cities and the industry to build the
infrastructure as far away from people as possible. Last year, the
Fort Worth City Council passed a gas-drilling ordinance that gives the
city some say over pipelines’ routes and safety standards. Several
experts tell the Observer, however, that the pipeline industry could
challenge the ordinance in court if the city enforces it too
aggressively.

“I think it’s an open-ended question of how far the cities are going
to go,” says Sarah Fullenwider, an attorney with the city of Fort
Worth. “We try very hard to find that middle ground,” she says,
between protecting the public and assisting the industry in getting
gas to market.

That’s not enough for activists and concerned residents on the
frontlines—folks like Steve Doeung, Fort Worth’s pipeline hero. A
voluble and impassioned man who’s struggling with Lyme disease, Doeung
showed citizens how to drum a pipeline out of a neighborhood: through
sheer, cussed stubbornness.

Steve

Local activist Steve Doeung at his Carter Avenue home

It helps that Doeung has faced more extreme adversity. His family fled
Cambodia when he was 11, right before the Khmer Rouge commenced its
genocidal slaughter of two million, including some of Doeung’s
relatives. He’s passionate about America in a way that seems almost
quaint. But he frets that the gas boom is not just bringing
environmental pollution but “a moral and civic pollution too.”

In spring 2008, Chesapeake Inc.—the granddaddy of gas outfits—
announced plans to bury a 24-inch gathering line in the front yards of
Carter Avenue, Doeung’s ethnically diverse, middle-class street just
south of Interstate 30. The pipeline was to serve a controversial well
just east of the neighborhood next to the Tandy Hills Natural Area.
Everything about the pipeline rubbed Doeung the wrong way: the seizure
of working people’s front yards; the bullying tactics Chesapeake used
to get his neighbors to sign on the dotted line; the way the city
looked the other way; and, most of all, the thought of his 8-year-old
daughter playing atop a dangerous pipeline.

Chesapeake quickly moved to acquire easements from homeowners, by hook
or by crook. And Doeung went to work. He helped organize his
neighbors, who pressured Chesapeake into downgrading the pipeline to
16 inches. Still, with the threat of costly and difficult condemnation
proceedings, most homeowners caved. By August 2008, Doeung was the
lone holdout.

“They were waving around that eminent-domain authority,” he said of
Chesapeake’s landmen. “Especially for me as a first-generation
immigrant escaping from a communist, totalitarian country, it just
didn’t gel—a private entity having that governmental power, such an
awesome power. Saying we’re going to do business, but they’re carrying
this big old shotgun with them.”

Doeung took his fight to court, dragging out the condemnation
proceedings for a year and a half. In a legal sense, Doeung lost. In
March, a judge signed an order allowing Chesapeake to take his
property. But meanwhile Sen. Wendy Davis helped broker a deal between
the Texas Department of Transportation and Chesapeake to re-route the
pipeline along the department’s I-30 right of way. The pipeline isn’t
in the ground yet, but Doeung is declaring tentative victory.

“I believe that it was a kinda test-run, a blueprint for how gathering
pipelines are gonna be done in the city,” said Doeung. “It was high-
stakes for me too. If I allowed that to happen without some kind-of
resistance, it would affect other people too. Other neighborhoods
would have less leverage or strength in protecting their families.”
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Forrest Wilder
Forrest Wilder

Forrest Wilder, a native of Wimberley, Texas, joined the Observer as a
staff writer in April 2005. Forrest specializes in environmental
reporting and runs the “Forrest for the Trees” blog. Forrest graduated
from the University of Texas at Austin in December 2003 with a degree
in Anthropology.
Website: www.texasobserver.org/forrestforthetrees E-mail:
wil...@texasobserver.org