Wednesday, September 15, 1999

COLUMN ONE Problems in the Pipelines Washington state rupture that killed three is a rallying point in the national debate over safety of underground oil channels. Industry officials say moving products that way is far less risky than the alternatives.

By KIM MURPHY, Times Staff Writer

BELLINGHAM, Wash.--The creek that meanders through Whatcom Falls Park was made for little boys. Trout lurk along the gravel bottom, easy prey for a fishing pole. There's a bike path nearby, shaded with cottonwoods and firs. Houses back right up to the park, so a kid with nothing to do can wander down and skip a rock across the water, just to see what will happen.

On June 10, a day before the end of fourth grade, 10-year-olds Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas made their way down to the creek to play. They picked up a lighter lying on the bank and started clicking it. What happened next was so horrible that even now, three months later, people who saw it still have nightmares. A towering tunnel of fire blasted down the creek, scorching everything in its path for a mile and a half. Smoke plumes towered hundreds of feet into the air. The fish in the creek were boiled alive and the boys, when another youth heard their screams and rushed down to help, were almost too hot to pick up.

They were awake, they were afraid, they were sorry, but there was no way to save them. As their families gathered at the hospital, whispered encouragement and cradled their feet, the only part of their bodies not charred, they died.

Another victim was 18-year-old Liam Wood, who was overcome by gasoline vapors while fishing further up the creek. He fell into the water and drowned.

What the boys didn't know, what indeed hardly anyone in Bellingham knew, was that the pipeline that carries jet fuel, gasoline and other petroleum products from central Washington refineries to Seattle and Portland lay directly underneath Whatcom Falls Park--and indeed, much of downtown Bellingham and suburban communities further south. The pipeline rupture, which released up to 277,000 gallons of gasoline into Whatcom Creek and set off a fire that burned for four days, has become a rallying point in the national debate over underground pipelines--the unseen oil highways that traverse 165,000 miles of America.

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman James E. Hall, using the Bellingham tragedy as ammunition, has accused the federal Office of Pipeline Safety of adopting rules that are "too little, too late" to guard the public against the potential catastrophe of pipeline failures. "This dismal record has continued far too long, and it needs to be addressed immediately . . . if we are going to protect public safety and the environment in the future," Hall, whose agency investigates pipeline accidents, told Congress in July. Indeed, the pipeline safety office has amassed the worst record of any federal transportation agency in adopting safety regulations recommended by the NTSB. The agency has missed deadlines for congressionally mandated safety reviews by years. The result, critics say, is that an aging network of underground pipelines is under constant threat from corrosion, pressure failure or rupture from nearby construction activities. Pipelines carry 65% of the nation's petroleum products from production facilities to refineries to the market. Industry officials and regulators say moving petroleum products by pipeline is far less risky than the alternatives: tanker trucks, trains and barges. Indeed, deaths are 87 times less likely to occur per gallon moved by pipeline than by truck, they say. Oil pipeline spills account for a tiny fraction of what is transported, and the number of accidents has dropped by 30% over the last three decades, the American Petroleum Institute's Steven Ball testified before Congress in July. "We are constantly striving to make [pipelines] safer," Ball said. "We believe no release of oil from our lines is acceptable." However, an average of 6.1 million gallons of oil and other hazardous liquids are released by pipelines each year, more than half the amount spilled during the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker disaster. Across the country, spills of at least 2,100 gallons occur an average of nearly four times a week.

Old Pipelines Carry Higher Risk of Failure

Though new technology has allowed many companies to conduct detailed internal inspections, detect leaks and shut off oil flows automatically in the event of a rupture, there are no federal regulations requiring these measures, even though the NTSB has been calling for them for several years. In addition, pipelines may also be vulnerable to other types of catastrophe. In their new book, "The Sword and the Shield," former spy Vasili Mitrokhin and Cambridge University professor Christopher Andrew reveal that in the 1960s and '70s, the KGB planned to bury explosives in the United States. An oil pipeline running from El Paso to Costa Mesa, Calif., was identified as one of these sabotage targets. California has 6,900 miles of active pipelines, more than 2,000 of them in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Some date back to the 1920s, with a risk of corrosion and failure that is 20 times that of newer pipelines, according to the California state fire marshal. Across the country, pipelines that were built in rural areas during the boom years of the 1950s and '60s have been overtaken by urban development, leaving them vulnerable to damage during construction, road-building and utility repair. The 400-mile-long Olympic Pipeline that traverses Bellingham runs underneath residential streets, through suburban backyards, alongside schools and day care centers. "People aren't aware. The public doesn't think about a pipeline lying out behind their property," said Charles Batten, former chief of the NTSB's pipeline materials and accident division, now a private consultant on pipeline issues who refuses to live near a pipeline. After Los Angeles lost a legal battle to stop it, the 132-mile-long Pacific Pipeline opened earlier this year, carrying oil from Kern County, down through Sylmar and underneath some of the most densely populated sections of South-Central Los Angeles before reaching the refineries at El Segundo. It is the first new crude oil pipeline route in the Los Angeles Basin in the last 35 years. The Bellingham accident is the most recent in a series of violent explosions touched off by pipeline spills that have left 35 people dead and 246 others injured over the last 15 years. The worst was in 1989, when a train derailed coming down the Cajon Pass and damaged a gasoline pipeline nearby. The pipeline ruptured and exploded two weeks later, killing six people and injuring 31 others in San Bernardino. In Lively, Texas, in 1996, a Koch Industries pipeline carrying liquid butane ruptured and ignited a nearby pickup truck, killing its two occupants. The NTSB blamed the incident on inadequate protection of the pipeline against corrosion, a phenomenon that plagues aging pipelines across the country. Contractors are at work digging up the entire beachfront of Avila Beach, near San Luis Obispo, to replace 300,000 cubic yards of earth soaked by leaking pipes. Unocal Corp., which is paying for the cleanup, has also agreed to pay $43.8 million, the largest state environmental penalty in California history, for contaminating the Central Coast with millions of gallons of petroleum from an underground pipeline at its Guadalupe Oil Field in San Luis Obispo County. Bellingham officials, who had paid little attention to their pipeline in recent years, got a quick education after the Whatcom Park tragedy.

"Initially, we thought this was a problem we should be able to fix in our community, a very specific problem. But the concerns of everybody broadened considerably as we realized this probably reflects a fairly serious deficit not only on the industry's part, but also on the federal government's capacity to enforce its own regulations," said Frank James, head of a citizens group organized to push for pipeline safety improvements in Bellingham. "Part of the problem is the [Office of Pipeline Safety] only has 105 staff positions for the whole country," said Bob Rackleff, a Tallahassee, Fla., county commissioner who heads the National Pipeline Reform Coalition. "Call up the OPS and ask them for a map of pipelines in the U.S. They don't know. Ask them what the average age of the pipelines operating today in America is. They have no idea." Though the technology exists to conduct internal inspections of underground pipelines for defects by way of a small camera known as a "smart pig," there is no federal requirement for routine inspections except during installation or after accidents. Indeed, pipelines only last year had to be built in such a way that they could be plumbed with inspection devices. Remote control valves that would quickly shut off the flow of oil or gasoline in the event of a rupture are not required except in certain locations. And after years of recommendations from the NTSB for training and certification of workers who operate pipelines, the OPS only this summer adopted such a regulation. NTSB officials have complained that the OPS sets no requirements for training or periodic testing, but leaves pipeline companies responsible for determining that their employees are qualified. Concerned that oil pipelines were running increasingly through urban and environmentally sensitive areas, Congress in 1992 passed a law requiring the OPS to survey those areas by 1994. Frustrated that various federal agencies were holding repeated workshops arguing over what lands should be included, the oil industry itself finally adopted a pilot project this year. Five years after the deadline, there is no nationwide survey in place. "It's an abysmal record. It really is," said James M. Pates, city attorney for Fredericksburg, Va., who has been pushing for better federal regulation since ruptures in 1980 and 1989 each wiped out the city's water supply for a week. OPS' new overseers acknowledge the agency has been slow to move on some safety recommendations under past leadership but insist that the agency's approach of developing risk management projects in partnership with pipeline operators is the best one because it focuses on specific safety risks, rather than theoretical ones. "This administration has consistently sought to empower the people who are most affected by an issue to develop bottom-up, community-based solutions," Kelley S. Coyner, administrator of the federal administration that oversees the OPS told Congress in July. The office has set a goal of reducing pipeline incidents caused by outside construction damage by 25% over the next three years, five times higher than the previous goal, Coyner said. It is a sad irony that many of the safety improvements the NTSB has been urging were put into place voluntarily by the Olympic Pipeline Co. in Washington. The company had a system of remote-control shut-off valves and had twice inspected the pipeline with "smart pigs" as recently as 1996. The tests showed 296 "anomalies" in the line but apparently few were serious enough to fix. Since the accident, the company has dug up and replaced all nine of the defective sections on the 37-mile section around Bellingham, and has pledged to do additional inspections along the entire 400-mile run. Though the NTSB has yet to determine the cause of the June 10 rupture, "we're trying to identify any kind of potential factor . . . as if it alone were the cause," said Olympic Pipeline spokeswoman Maggie Brown. "To reassure ourselves, to reassure the community, we have to address each and every issue." What happened on the day Wade and Stephen went down to play by the creek is still not clear--in part, because eight of the Olympic operators working that day have refused to answer investigators' questions, exercising their right against self-incrimination. A federal grand jury has reportedly been convened to investigate possible criminal violations of the Clean Water Act. For an unknown reason, the main computer running the pipeline stopped transmitting data about 3:25 p.m., and the backup computer lagged in coming back on line, leaving a gap of as much as 14 minutes, according to Allan Beshore, the NTSB's chief investigator on the case. During the computer glitch, a block valve south of Bellingham began oscillating and finally closed, building up pressure close to the pipe's design capacity inside the line. A relief valve designed to prevent pressure buildups failed to do so, and the pipeline finally ruptured along Hannah Creek, a tributary of Whatcom Creek. The rupture spewed out hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline that began coursing down the two creeks. NTSB investigators and attorneys for the boys' families want to ask pipeline operators about reports that they twice tried to restart the fuel flow after it had automatically shut down, apparently believing the alerts on their monitors were a result of the computer failure, not a rupture. By the time the boys fired the lighter in the park, many people had smelled a strong gasoline odor, and officials were already beginning to check it out when the creek literally exploded. The two boys jumped in the creek, but the water itself was on fire. By the time they emerged, all of their clothing, and as it turned out, most of their skin, had been burned off. Frank King ran down and waited with his son for the ambulance to arrive. The boy, he said, was still walking and talking--bewildered and apologetic, fearful that his mother would see him and "be sad and afraid." She was. Mary King came out of the house, saw her son and ran back inside in horror. "He asked me if he was going to be scarred for life," Frank King recalled in a recent interview. "I said, 'No, you're probably going to be OK.' But I looked at his burns and I thought, wow, and I started to get scared."

Injured Boy Had No Chance of Survival The two boys were airlifted to a burn center in Seattle. By the time the Kings arrived, Wade was on a respirator. The doctor told Frank King that his son had no skin left, that he could not be saved and that it was probably better to let him die quickly. "He said, 'You can touch him, you can hold him, you can hug him, you can talk to him. He will hear you,' " Frank King said. "We didn't see any response from him, but I started thinking if we don't give him permission, he may just linger on. So I kept telling him there was a ballgame going on in heaven, and they were waiting for him." His son's eyes welled up with tears, King recalls, and his nose began to run. Then the boy died. In a nearby room, 18-year-old Akilah Williams was singing a George Gershwin song to her stepbrother Stephen as his heart, too, began to falter. "One of these mornin's you're gonna rise up singin'," she sang. "You're gonna spread your wings and take to the sky. But 'til that mornin', ain't nothin' can harm you, with your daddy and mommy standin' by." Now, the families want better explanations. "The NTSB told me they'll be able to tell us what happened, but they'll never be able to tell us why it happened until those people who are pleading the 5th Amendment start talking," Frank King said. "Maybe this kind of accident is a onetime thing, and maybe the odds aren't very high that it would happen. But it did happen. And what would have happened if that explosion had occurred in the city? I mean, Bellingham might have been blown off the map."

Copyright 1999 Los Angeles Times. All Rights Reserved

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-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), September 15, 1999

Answers

Americans are good at lamenting these regretable yet inevitable oil pipeline and Valdez-type accidents while crusing around in their SUVs. Face it we're oil hogs. Four % of the world's population and we consume a third of the world's energy and 40% of the world's gasoline. Dont bag on the oil companies. They're just demand driven...

-- Downstreamer (downstream@bigfoot.com), September 15, 1999.

For an unknown reason, the main computer running the pipeline stopped transmitting data about 3:25 p.m., and the backup computer lagged in coming back on line, leaving a gap of as much as 14 minutes, according to Allan Beshore, the NTSB's chief investigator on the case. During the computer glitch, a block valve south of Bellingham began oscillating and finally closed, building up pressure close to the pipe's design capacity inside the line. A relief valve designed to prevent pressure buildups failed to do so, and the pipeline finally ruptured along Hannah Creek, a tributary of Whatcom Creek. The rupture spewed out hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline that began coursing down the two creeks.

NTSB investigators and attorneys for the boys' families want to ask pipeline operators about reports that they twice tried to restart the fuel flow after it had automatically shut down, apparently believing the alerts on their monitors were a result of the computer failure, not a rupture.

failures can and do cascade...

The two boys jumped in the creek, but the water itself was on fire. By the time they emerged, all of their clothing, and as it turned out, most of their skin, had been burned off. Frank King ran down and waited with his son for the ambulance to arrive. The boy, he said, was still walking and talking--bewildered and apologetic, fearful that his mother would see him and "be sad and afraid."

I have no problem saying this story moved me to tears. I could visualize my son in the same situation and it tore me to the depths of my soul.

I have family in Washington state...they're DWGIs.

Mike

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-- Michael Taylor (mtdesign3@aol.com), September 15, 1999.

This happened in my state,

I'm going to write my senators, congressmen, and get these a$$ holes kicked out of our state.

Horrible events like this happen, and the companies responsible play the quiet game, hoping it will all blow over.

This WAS forseeable, IMO. At the least, the public should know where these pipes are. If they are being used, a 'smart pig' could be sent down them and it could relay it's GPS position..

The pipes should be clearly labeled above ground.

Bryce

-- bryce (bryce@nw.com), September 15, 1999.

The oil industry might me "demand driven" as you say but I understand that the big-money oil guys, for decades, have squashed and/or bought off any likely alternatives to their products. We are pawns in their game.

This story makes me cry and feel sick.

-- Kristi (securxsys@cs.com), September 15, 1999.

It is terrible when something like this happens, but please be realistic. If these three kids had died in a car accident, you'd never have heard about it, or cared for more than 10 seconds if you did.

As regards Y2K, it is interesting evidence of how much trust is placed in automatic control systems. That's not unique to the oil industry though, unfortunately. If users could somehow see what buggy, jury-rigged junk most software is, I'm sure they would think twice before trusting anything safety-oriented to these systems.

-- You Know... (notme@nothere.com), September 15, 1999.

Please, think about the quote below:

For an unknown reason, the main computer running the pipeline stopped transmitting data about 3:25 p.m., and the backup computer lagged in coming back on line, leaving a gap of as much as 14 minutes, according to Allan Beshore, the NTSB's chief investigator on the case. During the computer glitch, a block valve south of Bellingham began oscillating and finally closed, building up pressure close to the pipe's design capacity inside the line. A relief valve designed to prevent pressure buildups failed to do so, and the pipeline finally ruptured.......

Please, remember it whenever you are assured that, "even if there are glitches in processing systems, the valves will failsafe to a closed position..."

As Robert Cook said sometime ago, chemical and refinery plants that cannot shut down properly (he was talking about electric supply) are essentially bombs.

-- Jon Williamson (jwilliamson003@sprintmail.com), September 15, 1999.

There was an article in the LA Times or the Daily news shortly after the Northridge earthquake(Jan.17th,1994)about Simi Valley,Ca.The article spoke of the danger from all the pipelines that carried petroleum products going through the city,how some were so old and thus could rupture.They didn't even know where some of these were located.Simi Vally is one of the Cities used as a conduit for petroleum to other parts of California.There was special concern because of the chance of earthquakes.It was really a good article.

-- maggie (aaa@aaa.com), September 15, 1999.

You Know,

Be realistic? How little you know about me (and others on this forum). I do care every time I see a story like this. I stop to help when needed at bad car wrecks. I have tried to console (and treat burns on) a mother who's 6 yr. old son was burning up in their mobile home and she had 3rd degree burns from trying to save him minutes before. Or pulling a bludgeoned mother out of a back bedroom and dealing with her questions about her 9 month old son just bludgeoned to death by her boyfriend (now dead on her kitchen floor, shot by a kind neighbor) You might be a cold, callous S.O.B. but we aren't all that way. If stories like the pipeline one can make more people aware of how screwed up things are then I am glad.

-- Kristi (securxsys@cs.com), September 15, 1999.