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CHET WHITE/THE NEWS & ADVANCE
Greg Heath, a Williams Gas Company employee who helped shut down the line a year ago, remembers seeing the fireball: ‘I thought, Good God, we’ve set the world on fire.’
Special Report: Appomattox Pipeline Explosion
- More stories on the pipeline explosion
- Aerial photos of the site one year ago and now
- 911 recordings from the day of the explosion
- Maps of pipeline incidents across the U.S.
The fireball that sent a shockwave through Appomattox a year ago has reverberated throughout the pipeline industry, and made the town’s name a household word in other communities where pipelines run.
“The Appomattox explosion was one of the few that caught national attention,” said Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust. “Williams (Gas Company) runs pipelines all over the country and there are lots of new proposed pipelines.
“People started using Appomattox to ask, ‘What about our pipelines?’”
Williams operates three lines that run side by side and move natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico through Appomattox to New York. One of those three lines ruptured on Sept. 14, 2008, and the gas it released ignited into a fireball that leveled two homes and injured five people.
The company eventually settled damage claims with 130 property owners; that plus work on the lines totaled about $15 million.
News of the rupture spread quickly among other gas companies as well as in communities that have one thing in common with Appomattox — their proximity to a pipeline.
“It was certainly a wake-up call,” said Weimer, whose organization promotes fuel transportation safety through education and advocacy.
“Oregon and other places used the Appomattox rupture to say, ‘The federal government thinks (the gas company is) partially at fault. Why should we trust them?’ It caused Williams a lot of internal head-scratching.”
Larry Hjalmarson, vice president of operations at Williams, said he’s retold the story of the Appomattox explosion some 60 times across the country. He has shared the lessons learned both about the problems that led to the disaster and how pipeline employees and the community responded in an emergency.
“This industry is extremely safe,” he said. “A rupture is rare. A rupture that impacts people is really rare.”
The explosion caused Williams to reevaluate and reinforce underlying protections on its pipelines systemwide, said Jeffrey Wiese, associate administrator of pipeline safety for the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
The rupture was caused by external corrosion that thinned the pipeline walls 50 to 75 percent. The metal couldn’t withstand the pressure of 800 pounds per square inch.
Williams was fined almost $1 million after investigators found possible failures to “address regulatory requirements for monitoring and preventing external corrosion,” according to an agency news release.
The company has stepped up its corrosion-control measures nationwide, Wiese said.
“If you look at the statistics … incidents with any consequence to people, injuries and fatalities, the trends are downward over the past 20 years,” Wiese said. “The threat to the public is going down at the same time the public is drawing more on it.
“The community can rest comfortably with the pipeline.”
News and data from the federal investigation into the pipeline failure proved useful to people fighting pipeline expansions in their communities, from Pennsylvania to Oregon.
People living along pipelines are taking their presence in their communities far more seriously since the explosion, Weimer said.
The same three pipelines that pulse natural gas through Appomattox run just more than 50 feet from Lynda Ferrell’s home in Pennsylvania, about 40 miles west of Philadelphia.
Two years before the explosion in Appomattox, Ferrell and some neighbors began to fight a proposal by Williams to expand part of one of the lines.
The rupture in Appomattox last September added fuel to their concerns.
“The citizens really started educating ourselves,” she said. “The Appomattox rupture happened while we were doing our self-education. The Appomattox line B is the same one that runs through Chester County, Pa. The citizens got a clear idea of what can happen if the worst happened.”
Chester County is a crossroads of sorts for five pipeline companies. Many of the property owners were aware of the easement, but had no idea what it meant for them, she said.
“A lot of these people had the pipe close to their houses — some within 20 feet to begin with,” she said. “I’ve talked to folks who knew about the easement and knew about the pipeline, and now, knowing what it’s all about, they are scared to live here.
“We were all wondering the same thing, ‘Do we have to sit back and watch it happen?’”
Ferrell and four other property owners battled Williams in court over seizing right-of-ways on their property through eminent domain. A federal judge would not grant the easement until Williams received state permits to cross two creeks and those were denied. The scope of the expansion was lessened and the watershed left alone.
“I was talking to my mother last week and she said, ‘Thank heaven it’s over for you,’” Ferrell said. “It’s not over. You get to a point where you know too much. Right now I know too much to feel comfortable living where I’m living. … I’m afraid of Appomattox and I’m afraid of eminent domain.”
Oregon State Rep. Chuck Riley tracked developments relating to the Appomattox rupture as he fought a bill that he said would “fast track” the approval process for liquefied natural gas terminals in that state.
Williams had proposed a 231-mile pipeline that would link one of its subsidiaries with a gas terminal. The project was one of three proposed in the state.
Riley opposed a house bill that he said would give too much power to corporations looking to seize private property by tying up property owners in lengthy court battles. The legislator had unsuccessful sponsored a bill that sought to tie any new pipeline projects to proven need in the state for more natural gas.
While the Appomattox explosion has drawn concern along other pipeline corridors, it also has drawn praise for how well emergency responders handled the crisis.
Bobby Wingfield, emergency services coordinator for Appomattox County, has been called to other states to discuss how seamlessly the various public safety officials came together during the disaster.
Virginia’s Department of Emergency Management is studying the community’s response, too.
“They did so many things right,” said Hjalmarson, the Williams executive. “It’s quite a thing to be proud of.”
County officials have made some changes in the aftermath. Most significantly, the county’s emergency communications center received an addition: Williams has funded a system to immediately notify utilities when they have an outage, Wingfield said.
During the rupture it was difficult to get messages to the utility companies — phone, electric, cable — that lost service, he said.
The program, installed just a few months ago, allows dispatchers to map the areas affected and automatically notify utility companies when there’s a major outage.
It’s a useful tool that Wingfield hopes won’t be needed.
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Two corrections: One - the size of the anomaly was approximately 9 square inches, not the nearly one square foot mentioned in the previous post. Two - the NACE committees are comprised of personnel directly associated with pipeline owner/operators and with personnel from industries and companies providing services to the pipeline industry.
One more item, the rule of thumb cost to maintain a pipeline is $2 per foot per year. Williams, for example, operates at least 10,000 miles of pipeline suggesting an annual maintenance budget requirement of at least $100 million. 20 years of ownership means that more than $2 billion should have been spent on pipeline maintenance. Any guesses as to how much has been spent? Makes excellent share value sense to pay for incidents when they occur rather than spend millions more non revenue generating, bottom line reducing funds to prevent them. FYI - there are at least 2.4 million miles of buried, regulated pipeline in the United States, that’s an annual budget of $26 billion. At a cost distribution of 40% material and 60% labor, that’s 300,000 man years of labor, of constant, annual employment for at least 300,000 people (at $25/hour average pay). In your dreams, as the pipeline fraternity mutters.
In April 2001, Williams Pipeline ran a test on an item of equipment that was designed to look for, and find, holes in the protective coating of one of their high pressure gas pipelines. In the report of the test, it was admitted that all other methods of finding this type of damage had been tried without success. These ‘other methods’ are what are still being used today. The tool used in the test did find a ‘holiday’ as they are called in the pipeline industry,where all other methods had failed. A holiday is the place on the pipeline where external corrosion can occur. A rupture causing holiday can be ANY size, from 1/8th square inch on up. The holiday found was slightly less than one square foot in area. Within 150 feet of the pipeline (and this holiday) were very expensive houses (the pipeline, and its twin, run under a golf course, a church parking lot and a children’s play sand pit in the back yard of an apartment complex, all within a mile or so). The test was observed by Federal and local government agencies from across the country. The test was performed as an unpaid demonstration and the site of the anomaly was found to be within 12 inches of where the tool measured it to be. The active site was about 8 feet below ground level so the cost of digging the hole to uncover the problem was quite big, perhaps $10,000 or more. And therein lies the problem. The cost of exposing KNOWN sites of potential problems precludes the use of tools that can find the problems, whenever possible. The pipeline industry has, over the years, developed a method of testing coatings that not only does not find all the problem areas that are a potential threat to people and the environment, in many cases the techniques and technologies employed CANNOT find the problem areas they are employed to find. This is a bit cynical on the part of the pipeline companies,IMHO. The tool is still around, it is used by Nuclear Generating stations to test their in-plant buried pipeline systems, because for that industry, the Regulations are very strict and are written by nuclear energy industry approved engineers. NACE, the National Association of Corrosion Engineers, the body that produces the ‘Standards’ used by the pipeline industry, in part for external corrosion control, produces these Standards by employing committees made up of people from within the pipeline industry. These committees are in many instances chaired by employees of companies like Williams. That a conflict can exists between protecting the public and protecting the financial well being of a pipeline operator is not hard to determine. The product of these committees, the Standards, are finalized by committee consensus. When the ‘consensus’ either cannot differentiate between the meaning of words, or, for some reason that is not scientifically defensible, prefers to use the WRONG word, and completely ignores actual Federal Regulation, pipeline explosions like this will continue to happen simply because in the majority of cases, it is CHEAPER for the pipeline company to pay for a clean up than it is to prevent one. Not much satisfaction in this attitude for the survivors of men, woman and children who die in pipeline accidents.
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