Plan B Forum

From the Weather Channel news service today:

Largest U.S. Gas Spill in 20 Years – 1.2 Million Gallons – Happened at a Cracked Pipeline in North Carolina Last Summer
It is the largest single gasoline spill in the U.S. since at least 2000, according to North Carolina Policy Watch, which used data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
"Based on this hydrogeological information and the location of the crack on the pipe, we believe the product may have flowed into the subsurface for a period of time, measured in days or weeks, before reaching the surface," Colonial Pipeline said in a news release.[ end of quote from the Weather Channel]

The company did nothing about it until gasoline on top of the ground was spotted by a bunch of kids messing around on ATVs in a nature preserve.

I always assumed that these pipeline outfits had pressure sensors that would notify them of a leak or some kind of inventory monitor that would tell them a million+ gallons went in but did not come out, just to control people stealing it. (This does happen to pipelines in other countries.) I thought gasoline was a valuable enuff asset that somebody like Colonial Pipeline would not want to just throw away more than a million gallons. Note that the Colonial news release says that they do not know how long it was leaking--but at least for days. It is just now becoming public knowledge with the fines state regulators have announced against Colonial.

Makes me have second thoughts about why those silly 'First Nations People" hadve no faith in the assurances that the pipeline under construction will be no hazard.

snailgate

You'd think there would be more automated alarms that actually function and at least alert that there may be an issue. Hell, in the fire service, you get automated alarms all the time for "water flow" in a sprinkler system (basically, if water is flowing, there is either a fire and a head activated or you have a leak). Maybe they got tired of silencing the alarms and turned them off. :dunno:

According to this article,

The sheer size of it points to a systemic weakness in pipeline safety — detection technologies can fail to notice even disastrous spills. In pipeline debates across the country, operators have assured the public they have top-flight systems for flagging leaks. But even the best systems can miss small leaks. Left unchecked, small leaks can grow into massive releases that foul the environment and trigger expensive, prolonged cleanups.

"Remote leak detection is a really tough animal. It's hard enough to find a big rupture," said Richard Kuprewicz, a chemical engineer who worked for years in the industry and now consults on pipeline safety. "The small leaks are more challenging. They're infinitely more difficult to locate."

Colonial's equipment can flag leaks as small as 3% of flow. But the pipeline is massive: Based on the gasoline line's capacity, 3% of the daily flow is 1.8 million gallons.

Also:

The leak also highlights a gap in regulations. Colonial had a leak detection system that covered the site of the crack, but it wasn't required to. In most rural areas, including Ward's neighborhood, the ability to detect leaks won't be required for about four years. And even then, the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration hasn't set standards for what such systems should be able to detect.

Federal regulations for years have required companies to have leak detection on some pipelines in "high consequence areas," generally areas that are densely populated or especially sensitive to environmental damage. But in most rural areas such equipment isn't required right now. PHMSA rules requiring remote leak detection systems everywhere went into effect last summer, and existing pipelines, such as Colonial and the Dakota Access pipeline, running from North Dakota to Illinois, have five years to comply.