Rackleff, president of the National Pipeline Reform Coalition, is a county
commissioner in Tallahassee, Fla., and former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He
led a grassroots organization that stopped an oil pipeline project in 1995 from being
built in North Florida.
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You can contact the National Pipeline Reform Coalition by e-mailing
Bob Rackleff at rackleffhsd@earthlink.net.
To comment on this topic, please write:
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ARTICLE:
Last month's natural-gas explosion that killed 12 near Carlsbad isn't
the only pipeline accident to afflict the country. There have been thousands of others. As
a result, a national pipeline safety reform movement is under way. Today's writer puts the
Carlsbad disaster in context, from a pipeline safety advocate's point of view.
The 12 deaths in the Aug. 19 El Paso Natural Gas pipeline explosion near
Carlsbad were casualties of only the latest in a long list of preventable oil and natural
gas pipeline accidents. They were also one more argument for passage of pending
legislation to toughen federal pipeline safety laws, reform the federal Office of Pipeline
Safety and expand the role of state and local governments. (The Senate on Thursday passed
S.2438, which would strengthen pipeline safety regulations. But the House must still
approve it, and many representatives are pushing for even tougher measures.)
In hundreds of communities across America, both oil and natural gas
pipeline accidents have needlessly caused tragic deaths and injuries, huge property damage
and lasting environmental damage.
According to Office of Pipeline Safety data, natural gas pipelines since
1986 have had over 3,116 reported accidents in the United States causing 309 deaths and
1,398 injuries and a half-billion dollars in property damages. These OPS statistics do not
include the Aug. 19 explosion.
The oil pipeline accident record is equally shameful. In the last 30
years, these pipelines have spilled 316 million gallons of crude oil and petroleum
products, according to Office of Pipeline Safety data that fail to include at least nine
out of 10 oil pipeline accidents. Even so, the spills averaged 10.5 million gallons a year
the equivalent of an
Exxon Valdez every year, year after year. The total spilled last year
alone was 6.5 million gallons.
Here are four of those accidents:
A year ago, three children died in Bellingham, Wash., when about 250,000
gallons of gasoline from an Olympic Pipeline line leaked into a creek and flowed
downstream through a city park before it exploded in flames. A criminal investigation of
the pipeline company is under way.
On Nov. 21, 1996, a propane gas pipeline exploded in a San Juan, Puerto
Rico, department store, killing 33 people and injuring 69 others. The National
Transportation Safety Board determined that San Juan Gas Company's employees were not
properly trained and failed to locate a leak reported days before the explosion occurred.
Inadequate corrosion protection caused a Koch Industries butane pipeline
in Lively, Texas, to leak and explode in a fireball that killed two teenagers on Aug. 24,
1996. Pipeline operators had ignored repeated telephone calls from residents about the
smell of gas fumes there.
In 1994, a Texas Eastern natural gas pipeline ruptured and exploded in
Edison, N.J., killing a young woman and destroying a nearby apartment complex. Outside
damage by a salvage company in the right of way was the cause but the underlying cause was
the pipeline company's failure to restrict activity on that right of way.
The pipeline companies claim that "outside damage" is the main
cause such as a careless backhoe operator implying that it's not the companies' fault. But
the reality is that 75 to 80 percent of pipeline accidents happen because of corrosion,
operator error, defective equipment or other causes within the control of the pipeline
company.
Given this record, the inescapable conclusion is that pipeline companies
long ago calculated the economics of their industry and determined that it was cheaper to
let accidents happen than it was to prevent these accidents. In other words, most of the
victims of pipeline accidents have been victims of an acceptable risk.
And judging by the results so far, they were right. Pipelines are a very
profitable business. According to Oil & Gas Journal data, in 1998 natural gas pipeline
companies had an overall net income, after taxes, of $3.01 billion on
operating revenues of $13.58 billion a 22.2 percent rate of return. Oil pipeline companies
had an even higher rate of return on revenues 29.8 percent based on net income of $2.05
billion on operating revenues of $6.89 billion. In the same year, all Fortune 500
companies had a median return on sales of 4.4 percent.
El Paso Natural Gas Co. in 1998 earned $256 million on operating revenues
of $426 million for an eye-popping 60 percent return.
These handsome profits are a direct result of lax regulation of pipelines.
After all, if an industry has few regulations and almost no enforcement and can spill
without meaningful penalties, it can shortchange maintenance and safety programs, undercut
competitors such as marine carriers on cost and make big profits.
For example, Colonial Pipeline reduced its engineering services staff by
35 percent from 1994 to 1996, increasing its return on revenues to 28 percent at the same
time it had horrendous accidents and expanded its East Coast share of gasoline and other
refined products markets.
This neglect by regulators and the industry comes at a particularly bad
time. Because its peak decades of construction were the 1950s and 1960s, most of the
pipeline system has been in the ground for more than three decades, poorly maintained or
inspected and corroding away. A state study in California found that one out of every five
miles of oil pipelines there were built before 1940 and that half of those were built
before 1926.
Yet there is no national policy to repair and rebuild this system in fact,
there is no federal requirement that a pipeline ever has to be replaced, no matter how old
it is so we can expect pipeline accidents to increase in number and severity.
At the core of this neglect is the Pipeline Safety Act, which gives the
Office of Pipeline Safety exclusive jurisdiction over oil and natural gas pipeline
regulation. No state or local government can regulate pipelines without Office of Pipeline
Safety certification.
To act as the chief regulator of the nation's pipeline system, the Office
of Pipeline Safety has a total staff of 105 people. It has only about 50 field inspectors
to police some 1.7 million miles of oil and natural gas pipelines nationwide, or about one
for every 34,000 miles of pipeline. In comparison, the Coast Guard has over 42,000
uniformed and civilian personnel to help enforce regulations on the oil tanker ship and
barge industry.
Moreover, the regulatory standards enforced by the Office of Pipeline
Safety are so vague and few in number that pipeline companies are free to interpret them
at their convenience.
Pipeline regulations, for example, do not specify any periodic inspection
by pressure testing, internal inspection devices or any means at all, except for visual
surveillance of the right of way, usually done by airplane. These regulations do not
require automatic or remote-controlled shutoff valves, double-wall pipelines or line
volume and pressure monitors.
Nearly one-third of all oil pipelines are exempt from federal regulations
because they are low-pressure or in rural areas even though studies show that these exempt
pipelines spill more than regulated pipelines. An exempt Marathon Oil pipeline near
Carlsbad leaked nearly 1.5 million gallons of natural gas liquids into the ground for
months before being detected in 1991.
When regulatory improvements have been proposed, the Office of Pipeline
Safety has consistently rejected them, stating that they would be unnecessary financial
burdens on the pipeline industry. For example, the Office of Pipeline Safety rejected as
too expensive a proposal in 1990 to require that pipeline companies provide state and
local governments with maps of pipelines within their boundaries.
In fact, the Office of Pipeline Safety has no map of the national
pipeline system it is supposed to regulate. It is developing such a map today, but it
applies only to interstate pipelines, is voluntary, and its target is for only 70 percent
compliance. It has no comprehensive data on the age and condition of these pipelines,
types of pipe used,
the use of protective measures like coatings, the causes of accidents or
which pipeline companies have better or worse safety records.
It investigates only about one in 10 pipeline accidents reported to it and
almost never takes any meaningful enforcement action. For example, in 1998, the Office of
Pipeline Safety proposed fines in only 4 percent of its enforcement actions down from 49
percent in 1990 relying instead on warning letters and "letters of concern."
As Jim Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told
the Association of Oil Pipelines last year, "There is nowhere today the sense that
the Office of Pipeline Safety is in charge . . . or that its regulations, its inspections,
its assets, its staffing and its spirit are adequate to the task."
So, what do we do about this?
First, we urgently need Congress to pass legislation to expand the role
of state and local governments, improve construction and operating standards, improve
accident and other key data, improve inspection and enforcement provisions, including
citizen suits, toughen requirements for siting and routing of new pipelines, expand
community right-to-know requirements and increase funding of pipeline safety programs.
Second, the Department of Transportation must accomplish a major change
of agency culture at the Office of Pipeline Safety to stop its management from acting as
if its main responsibility is to serve the pipeline industry and not the public.
Third, state and local governments must pay attention to their pipeline
safety responsibilities, enacting such land-use measures as setback requirements to stop
the steady encroachment of commercial and residential development on and near pipeline
rights of way.
Communities should organize themselves to stop new, dangerous pipeline
projects from being built. It makes little sense to let an industry expand when it has
shown itself unfit to operate safely what it already has.
Given the economic and political clout of the oil and natural gas
industry, this is a huge challenge. But an informed public can prevail. And I suspect that
the people of New Mexico are up to the challenge.
PHOTO BY: Carlsbad Current-Argus via AP
El Paso Natural Gas pipeline employees assess the damage Aug. 20 at the
site of the natural gas pipeline explosion south of Carlsbad the day before. Twelve people
who were camping at the scene died as a result of the blast. |
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