Pipeline unsafety - notes from New Orleans
COMMENT: In 1999, a gasoline pipeline running through a park in Bellingham, blew up, killing three young people. The legal settlement included a court-ordered creation of a $4 million trust, the Pipeline Safety Trust. The Trust concerns itself with improving safety regulations, oversight and performance of pipelines and other methods of moving oil and gas, including liquified natural gas (LNG).
Californian Michael Holmstrom was at the Trust's annual conference in New Orleans last week. His observations are trenchant. While the stats and the data are from the US, there is less transparency, less regulation, and less oversight of pipelines in Canada, and especially in BC.
This builds on data that the pipeline industry finds very convenient, and hides behind at every opportunity: that many incidents ("incident" meaning "unintended loss of contents", and which range from a pinhole corrosion leak to a blast that kills) are caused by third parties. But as Holmstrom's notes reveal, pipeline operators are responsible for a great many incidents themselves. Their hands are far from clean.
But to get industry and government to say, "it'll never happen again" is impossible. Blame avoidance, misdirection, obfuscation, and wheedling sometimes seem like the sole preoccupation of these two after an accident. Who got called first? A first responder? Or a lawyer?
A case in point is Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Pipeline oil rupture in Burnaby in 2007. The actual puncture was caused by a machine operator working for Cusano Contracting, hired by the City of Burnaby. Regulations required the operator to hand-dig and expose the pipe if he had any doubt as to the location of the pipeline. He didn't do that. Great alibi for Kinder Morgan. But either Kinder Morgan's maps were incorrect, or the directions the operator received from Kinder Morgan were incorrect or misunderstood. In the finger-pointing, which at last look involves Cusano, Burnaby, and Kinder Morgan, and in the claims for damages from residents, Shell and Chevron, lawyers will enrich themselves, and justice will not be served.
Canada's Transportation Safety Board, whose job it is to determine what did happen and who was at fault, will probably take yet another year before issuing its gently worded report on the cause of the incident and what should be done so it won't happen again.
PPTS = Pipeline Performance Tracking Systems
API/AOPL = American Petroleum Institute / Association of Oil Pipe Lines
A presentation of note from New Orleans
Mike Holmstrom
24 November 2008
I guess I'll start off about New Orleans.
Beyond the beignets & Cajun burgers, I found the info from Cheryl Trench, from Allegro Energy Consulting, to be very interesting. This was Excavation damage info that was mined from API/AOPL reports. This can be found here:
PPTS Operator Advisory: More To Do on Excavation Damage
Excavation Damage Basics
What: Excavation encompasses a range of types of damage resulting from a range of activities, not all of which may strictly be considered to be "excavation." The damage is generally caused by a foreign object such as a backhoe, auger, or plow hitting and damaging the pipeline. It does not include damage caused by earth movement such as subsidence or a landslide.
Who: As used in PPTS, excavation damage can be caused by first, second, or third parties. PPTS defines them as the following:
First Party – Employee(s) of the operator.
Second Party – The operator's contractor.
Third Party – Person or persons not involved with operating or maintaining the pipeline. Third parties can be farmers, landowners, developers, excavators, road crews, other pipeline operators, or utility workers not related to the pipeline, among other types of entities.
OK, seems like routine past info, BUT;
The chart on page 6 shows that 16% of the excavation damage to liquid pipelines is from that pipeline's employees or their contractors!!!
In Medicine I think it's called Malpractice. Sounds like a bunch of refresher training is needed.
Almost as bad is the amount of damage done by other pipelines (!!!), or by other One Call entities, cable, water, phone, etc. Another 27% there.
"Do as we say about One Call, but not as we do"??
-Mike Holmstrom
Posted by Arthur Caldicott on 25 Nov 2008