Officials discuss lessons from Appomattox pipeline explosion

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The Appomattox County and town officials held a special called meeting at the Crown Sterling restaurant in Lynchburg.

Chris Stockton, spokesperson for the company, said the restaurant was chosen because it was a large enough venue to handle the number of people expected — about 18 people between Williams personnel and community leaders.

The company bankrolled the dinner.

On Sept. 14, 2008, one of three pipelines that comprise Williams’ Transco line ruptured and then exploded, injuring five people, leveling two homes and damaging 55 other houses. The resulting fireball scorched land some 1,125 feet in diameter.

Investigators discovered that external corrosion had caused the line to break.

Thomas Conrad, chairman of the county’s board of supervisors, thanked the Williams officials for the kindness and hospitality through out the process of rehabilitating the community.

Larry Hjalmarson, vice president of operations at Williams, said from the beginning the company realized that the community needed to remain informed and up-to-date.

“Now it’s almost a year since the accident and it still seems so fresh in our minds,” Hjalmarson said.

Since the rupture, Hjalmarson has shared the story of how it happened and the community and company’s response some 60 times.

“From a people standpoint it was our worst fear, a failure like this,” Hjalmarson said. “… In a crisis you learn a lot above people.”

Hjalmarson said much of his presentation consists of how emergency responders handled the incident, including not trying to fight the blaze, which could have cost them their lives.

“As bad as this tragedy was, it didn’t get any worse,” Hjalmarson said. They knew how to respond, he said, because they had trained with Williams personnel.

“A rupture is rare,” he said. “A rupture that impacts people is really rare.”

Hjalmarson said the lessons learned from the rupture are resulting in work by General Electric to improve the inline inspection tools to find anomalies like the one that caused the rupture — a gradual thinning of the pipe’s walls due to external corrosion.

This type of anomaly is very rare, he said, and hasn’t happened on other pipelines as far as Hjalmarson’s colleagues are aware.

The tool had been run on the line before the explosion but it didn’t detect the problem, he said. The company is also working to improve the cathodic protection that weren’t as effective in the soil around that line. The protection is a light electrical current applied to the line to prevent corrosion.

Gary Tanner, vice chairman of the board, said Williams has always been a good neighbor.

“You all are well respected in the community,” he added.

Williams spent almost a year digging up, repairing and replacing sections of pipe along the 30-inch line that exploded and its two neighboring pipelines.

The three pipelines run side by side through Appomattox County carrying natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico to New York, including 858 miles in Virginia.