San Bruno Conflagration: Could it Happen Here?

I was listening to NPR's On Point in the car today. The topic was "Pipelines to Potholes: America's Ailing Infrastructure."  The pipelines are everywhere and they're old. As if we don't already have enough to worry about, the answer is yes, San Bruno could happen here and in lots of places.

Now, the On Point show rang really true for me, because I do indeed live on top of a pipeline. Priscilla from Williamsburg called in and told Tom Ashbrook and his guests all about it. She explained that the Williamsburg area grew quickly after World War I as the rural area's land was gobbled up by the military. (Everyone around here likes to say that "My God, they sold the town" in reference to John D Rockefeller buying up the little village of Williamsburg, but really, the area had already been sold my the time the Standard Oil Robber Baron came to town.) Just look at the map: Camp Peary, Cheatham Annex, and the Naval Weapons Station, established in the 1940s, encompass a fair amount of the York County and York River side of our peninsula.

In this map, you can see that I live over that little bump in the Colonial Pipeline between Powhatan Creek and Route 199, just north of Jamestown Road. According to the Colonial Pipeline website, a variety of refined petroleum in batches of up to 350,000 barrels at a time travel under my street at 3 to 5 miles per hour. The batches are following one after another in a turbulent flow: an interface is the zone where one stops and the next starts and this degraded product might be sold as regular gasoline or have to be re-refined.

Today I noticed that there are several new signs in my neighborhood marking the petroleum pipeline. One is in the front yard of a house that's for sale. The San Bruno explosion probably isn't helping Jay Colley. On Monday, ABC news included a report where Carl Weimer of the Pipeline Safety Trust was quoted as saying, "There is a pipeline accident every other day and every five days someone is injured or killed, so there's still way too many incidents. It's something we need to get a clear handle on before it gets worse." O-kay.

If our pipelines were put into place for the military, as I've been told, they must be around 60 to 70 years old. The San Bruno pipeline, which carried natural gas, not liquid petroleum, was a mere 54 years old. Weimer, who was also on the On Point show, was concerned about the decay of pipes 40 or more years old because these pipes were constructed with a seam. Sections that go under roads or waterways are made up of seamed sections. The seams are susceptible to corrosion. Tom Ashbrook said there are still some pipelines in the U.S. made of cast iron and wood. 

The condition of our aging infrastructure is of great concern. In previous posts I've looked at our energy future, and the development of alternatives also is dependent upon infrastructure updates. It boggles the mind.

"Hopefully we'll see some good come out of this," said Weimer of the San Bruno explosion on On Point. While lots of ruptures happen, they usually happen in less populated areas. He and others called for more diligent regulation and thorough inspections.