Longhorn debate calls attention to pipelines

By Chris­t­ian Davenport
Austin Amer­i­can-States­man Staff
April 16, 2000

Orig­i­nal arti­cles (were) online at: http://www.austin360.com:80/news/1metro/2000/04/16pipelines_001.html

Several lines cross Central Texas, but they go unnoticed — until an accident happens

They are three feet below the sur­face, a labyrinth of steel veins that pump oil and gaso­line from one end of the coun­try to the oth­er under hous­es, schools and rivers. Although they car­ry haz­ardous mate­ri­als, the nation’s pipelines are undoubt­ed­ly the safest way to trans­port the prod­ucts that mod­ern soci­ety depends on to fuel cars, heat homes and light stoves. 

But some­times pipelines leak. And although most spills are quick­ly cleaned up before they pose any threat, oth­ers kill peo­ple and wildlife, con­t­a­m­i­nate pub­lic drink­ing water sources and set off spec­tac­u­lar explo­sions that send tow­ers of flames and smoke into the air.

Last year, pipeline acci­dents in the Unit­ed States killed 21 peo­ple, injured 106 and caused near­ly $100 mil­lion in prop­er­ty dam­age. And no place in the coun­try has more pipeline acci­dents than Texas.

In Cen­tral Texas, the pipelines criss­cross north to south and east to west through the heart of Austin, tak­ing paths under Town Lake, the Col­orado Riv­er, and count­less homes. 

Yet in the debate over whether the Long­horn pipeline can be reopened to pump gaso­line 700 miles from Hous­ton to El Paso, the rest of the mas­sive spaghet­ti-like sys­tem of pipelines has been vir­tu­al­ly ignored. So has the pipeline indus­try’s his­to­ry of spills; there have been about 6 mil­lion gal­lons of spilled mate­r­i­al a year for the past decade — the equiv­a­lent of an Exxon Valdez spill every two years. 

Right now there are hun­dreds of thou­sands of miles of pipelines car­ry­ing haz­ardous mate­ri­als across Texas. Cur­rent­ly, two oper­at­ing lines fol­low vir­tu­al­ly the same route as Long­horn, which has been dor­mant since 1995. 

Those lines are sel­dom mentioned. 

“It’s a clas­sic case of out of sight, out of mind,” said Bob Rack­l­eff, the head of the Nation­al Pipeline Reform Coali­tion. “These pipelines are under­ground where nobody thinks about them.”

If it weren’t for a group of Hill Coun­try ranch­ers, the Long­horn project could have been just as anony­mous. The ranch­ers’ law­suit, paid for by one of Long­horn’s com­peti­tors, prompt­ed a fed­er­al judge to order a review of the pipeline. Since then, Long­horn’s oppo­nents have focused on the integri­ty of the 50-year-old pipeline, its record of 60 spills, and the threat it could pose to the hous­es and schools along its path.

Now, a year and half lat­er, the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency and the U.S. Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion are expect­ed to decide whether the Long­horn pipeline, once used for crude oil, can be reopened. That deci­sion could come as ear­ly as this week.

Mean­while, Con­gress is decid­ing what to do with the fed­er­al agency that over­sees pipelines, the Office of Pipeline Safe­ty. A pipeline explo­sion in Belling­ham, Wash., that killed three boys prompt­ed U.S. Sen. Pat­ty Mur­ray, D‑Wash., to file leg­is­la­tion that would give states more pow­er in inspect­ing pipelines. And last week, Vice Pres­i­dent Al Gore intro­duced the Pipeline Safe­ty and Com­mu­ni­ty Pro­tec­tion Act of 2000, which would increase safe­ty mea­sures and inspec­tions in dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed and envi­ron­men­tal­ly sen­si­tive areas.

The Office of Pipeline Safe­ty has 55 inspec­tors nation­wide, includ­ing 10 sta­tioned in Hous­ton who are respon­si­ble for the pipelines in Texas, Okla­homa, New Mex­i­co, Ari­zona and Louisiana.

Pipeline crit­ics such as Rack­l­eff say pipeline prob­lems are a result of a lack of gov­ern­men­tal over­sight, aging lines that cor­rode and break, and cities and sub­urbs that con­tin­ue to build direct­ly over pipelines.

But the indus­try says there is no safer way to trans­port petro­le­um prod­ucts than by pipeline, and the amount spilled is just a sliv­er of what is trans­port­ed safely. 

“We do just about every­thing human­ly pos­si­ble to ensure that the sys­tem works at its best,” said Daphne Mag­nu­son, a spokes­woman for the Amer­i­can Gas Asso­ci­a­tion. “There is no way to guar­an­tee zero risk, but that’s what we’re work­ing toward.”

Dal­las-based Long­horn Pipeline Part­ners — owned by a group of com­pa­nies that includes Exxon Mobil Corp. and BP Amo­co — say the pipeline has been one of the most scru­ti­nized pipelines ever and is one of the safest in the country.

“From day one, since we’ve tak­en over this pipeline, our whole focus has been on upgrad­ing and improv­ing this pipeline,” said Long­horn Pres­i­dent Carter Mont­gomery. “If you look at the record of the pipeline busi­ness, an inci­dent is the excep­tion, not the rule.”

Chance of spills

Texas has more than 250,000 miles of pipeline that car­ry nat­ur­al gas, crude oil and oth­er refined prod­ucts. The state has more miles of pipeline than any oth­er state, and Texas has about one-sixth of all the pipelines in the coun­try. Between 1984 and 1999 there were 1,654 acci­dents, which killed 46, injured 339 and caused near­ly $138 mil­lion in damage.

In the past 10 years, an aver­age of 392 spills occurred each year nation­wide, or more than one spill per day, accord­ing to the Office of Pipeline Safe­ty. Dur­ing that time, pipeline acci­dents killed more than 200 peo­ple, injured near­ly 1,000 and caused more than $780 mil­lion in prop­er­ty damage.

In 1992, more than half of the oil spilled in the Unit­ed States — 52.5 per­cent — came from pipelines, accord­ing to a report in the Oil & Gas Jour­nal, a trade magazine.

Engi­neers Diane Hov­ey and Edward Farmer wrote an arti­cle in that pub­li­ca­tion last year about the like­li­hood of “reportable” spills — those involv­ing a death, an injury that requires hos­pi­tal­iza­tion or prop­er­ty dam­age of $50,000 or more.

“The unavoid­able sta­tis­ti­cal truth is that even short, sim­ple pipelines will have a reportable spill dur­ing a 20-year life­time,” they wrote. “Oper­a­tors of long pipelines (1,000 miles of pipeline) can expect a reportable acci­dent every year. In essence, if you oper­ate a pipeline you are going to have an accident.”

Many fear that a spill in Austin would be dis­as­trous. The city esti­mates that 60,000 Austin res­i­dents live with­in one mile of the Long­horn line and that there are 15 Austin schools with­in 1.5 miles of the line.

The pipeline cross­es the Edwards Aquifer and the Col­orado and Ped­er­nales rivers, all of which sup­ply Austin and Cen­tral Texas with drink­ing water. The line would car­ry gaso­line and jet fuel, which unlike oil or nat­ur­al gas would move quick­ly if spilled through the cat­a­combs of the aquifer. The gas would con­tain MTBE, a dan­ger­ous addi­tive that dis­solves in water and is pos­si­bly a human carcinogen. 

“There would be a whole lot of prod­uct com­ing out of that line at a high pres­sure,” said Nico Hauw­ert, senior hydro­ge­ol­o­gist for the Bar­ton Springs/Edwards Aquifer Con­ser­va­tion Dis­trict. “If it spills (over the aquifer), it will reach Bar­ton Springs.”

In recent weeks, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D‑Austin, and Texas Land Com­mis­sion­er David Dewhurst have ques­tioned the safe­ty of the pipeline and have asked the EPA to study it fur­ther. Dewhurst also threat­ened to with­hold grant­i­ng the pipeline ease­ments across state land until he is con­vinced it is safe. 

Safe­ty measures

Long­horn says its line is safe.

The com­pa­ny points to a pre­lim­i­nary study con­duct­ed for the EPA that con­clud­ed that its pipeline will have “no sig­nif­i­cant impact” on the envi­ron­ment or human safe­ty as long as Long­horn com­pletes 34 “mit­i­ga­tion mea­sures.” The com­pa­ny has agreed, for exam­ple, to fre­quent­ly inspect pipeline seg­ments in pop­u­lat­ed or envi­ron­men­tal­ly sen­si­tive areas. It will also per­form peri­od­ic inter­nal test­ing of the line to test its strength and detect flaws and cracks; replace the old pipe over the Edwards Aquifer with new, thick­er-walled pipe; and install a spe­cial leak-detec­tion and con­trol sys­tem over the aquifer. 

“We’re putting up signs and leak-detec­tion sys­tems,” Mont­gomery said. He added that fed­er­al agen­cies “reached a con­clu­sion of ‘no sig­nif­i­cant impact’ because of the mit­i­ga­tion we agreed to do.”

The com­pa­ny has stud­ied “the integri­ty of the pipeline, which is more impor­tant than the age,” Mont­gomery said. “We’ve test­ed it, we’ll test it again before it opens, and we will con­tin­ue to test it after we are in operation.” 

A report for the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute found that an acci­dent involv­ing an oil truck is 87 times more like­ly than a pipeline acci­dent. Replac­ing a pipeline that pumps 6.3 mil­lion gal­lons a day would require a fleet of 750 trucks, accord­ing to the report. 

Anoth­er report found that in the past 30 years the num­ber of oil spills decreased by 40 per­cent, from an aver­age of 318 spills to 197, and the vol­ume of spills decreased by 60 per­cent, from 14.8 mil­lion gal­lons to 5.8 mil­lion. The num­ber of oil spills has decreased dur­ing the past four years, as well, from 195 inci­dents in 1996 to 149 in 1998.

“This is a big sys­tem; it moves lots and lots of oil,” said Ben Coop­er, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Oil Pipelines. “The ques­tion is, what’s the low­est lev­el of leaks you can get to? The trend is down, and that’s what you’d expect as time goes on and you get bet­ter tech­nol­o­gy. We have 44,000 peo­ple killed on the high­way every year, so we’ve devel­oped air bags and seat belts and safer cars.”

The indus­try also points to data that show that a lead­ing cause of pipeline acci­dents is out­side forces, such as con­struc­tion crews who dig with­out know­ing a pipeline is under­neath them.

Mag­nu­son said the nat­ur­al gas indus­try spends about $2 bil­lion a year on safe­ty pro­grams and has spent much of its resources pro­mot­ing a 1998 law that requires con­struc­tion crews to call a hot line that lists the loca­tions of pipelines.

“There is an incred­i­ble amount of con­struc­tion going on and fiber-optic cable being laid,” Mag­nu­son said. “If we can cut down on third-par­ty dam­age and get a pro­gram in place that will improve com­mu­ni­ca­tion among the peo­ple out there dig­ging and the pipeline com­pa­nies, I think we’ll go a long way in mak­ing our safe­ty record even better.”

Dead­ly accident

Soon after the calls start­ed flood­ing all 10 of Kauf­man Coun­ty’s 911 lines in August 1996, Don Lind­sey, the coun­ty fire mar­shal and emer­gency coor­di­na­tor, told his staff to set up for mass casualties. 

A pipeline car­ry­ing liq­uid butane had bro­ken near the town of Live­ly, south­east of Dal­las, and it was gush­ing out with such force that “you could hear the hiss­ing from miles away,” Lind­sey said.

The smell prompt­ed peo­ple to evac­u­ate their homes, and it made Danielle Smal­l­ey, 18, sick to her stom­ach as she was pack­ing her bags for col­lege. She told her father that she and a friend, Jason Stone, 17, would dri­ve into town to report the odor to coun­ty offi­cials because their home did not have a phone. 

When their car drove into the butane vapor cloud, it exploded.

“It was like you dropped a napalm bomb; every­thing was charred,” said Lind­sey, who is now retired. “There was a flash, and then there was noth­ing left. It killed every­thing. There was not a bird chirp­ing or a grasshop­per mak­ing a noise. You just stood and looked, and the grass was gone, and all there was was a few burn­ing tim­bers. It was just pure black.”

Smal­l­ey and Stone were killed instantly. 

But the fire burned for 37 hours. 

In its report after the acci­dent, the Nation­al Trans­porta­tion Safe­ty Board con­clud­ed that the leak was caused because the line had cor­rod­ed. And the report said: “Because no over­all require­ment exists for (pipeline) oper­a­tors to eval­u­ate pipeline coat­ing con­di­tions, prob­lems sim­i­lar to those that occurred on this pipeline could occur on oth­er pipelines.” 

A 1993 report in the Oil & Gas Jour­nal con­clud­ed that old­er lines are more like­ly to cor­rode and leak. A 1,000-mile line, for exam­ple, has a 22 per­cent chance of leak­ing because of cor­ro­sion with­in one year and a 99 per­cent chance of leak­ing with­in 20 years, accord­ing to the study.

Still, most acci­dents occur when con­struc­tion crews break the under­ground lines. 

That’s what hap­pened in 1979 to the Long­horn, which at the time was owned and oper­at­ed by Exxon and car­ry­ing crude oil. A con­struc­tion crew was dig­ging a ditch for a water line in South Austin when it hit the pipeline. About 46,200 gal­lons spilled, and 41,160 gal­lons were cleaned up along Ft. Sumter Road. Then, a few years lat­er, res­i­dents in the area start­ed call­ing the city to com­plain that their tap water smelled like gasoline.

“When you turned the water on, you could smell it and taste, and you knew that’s what it was,” said Jack Gatlin, act­ing direc­tor of field oper­a­tions for the city’s water util­i­ty. He said con­stituents of the oil had “seeped through” the res­i­dents’ water pipes, but nobody got sick. “They called the water depart­ment because they were scared to drink the water, and right­ly so.” The city replaced the pipes with stronger ones, he said.

The Long­horn pipeline broke again in 1987 after it was hit by a con­trac­tor. This time about 48,300 gal­lons of oil spilled near the inter­sec­tion of Brodie and Slaugh­ter lanes, near the Cir­cle C subdivision. 

Nobody was injured, and the spill, like many oth­ers, gar­nered lit­tle or no media atten­tion and was forgotten.

That was the case with most of the 60 spills from the Long­horn pipeline. There were 12 spills of at least 50 bar­rels — or 2,100 gal­lons — or more from the pipeline and 48 spills from pump­ing sta­tions, accord­ing to a study com­mis­sioned by the EPA.

In 1998, a seg­ment of the Long­horn pipeline near Hous­ton explod­ed dur­ing a test for faults, slight­ly injur­ing one worker.

Just in the past few weeks, there have been sev­er­al major pipeline spills across the coun­try, two of which were in Texas.

• On April 8, 111,000 gal­lons of fuel oil spilled into the Patux­ent Riv­er, a trib­u­tary to the Chesa­peake Bay, in south­ern Mary­land. A cou­ple of days lat­er, it had spread for 5 miles down the riv­er, killing wildlife but pos­ing no threat to humans. 

• On March 22, a nat­ur­al gas pipeline explod­ed south­east of San Anto­nio, send­ing flames high into the air and blast­ing a hole in U.S. 181. No one was injured.

• On March 10, about 500,000 gal­lons of gaso­line spilled into a creek that runs into Lake Tawakoni, which pro­vides Dal­las with 25 per­cent to 30 per­cent of its drink­ing water. Small lev­els of MTBE were found in the lake where the creek enters it, said David Bary, a spokesman for the EPA. Dal­las has stopped tak­ing water from the lake, and the city will spend $12 mil­lion to build a new pipeline to anoth­er water source.

• On Feb. 12, author­i­ties found that a pipeline had leaked as much as 600,000 gal­lons of oil through a hole the size of a pen­cil eras­er in Delaware. They said the pipeline had been leak­ing unde­tect­ed for eight to 12 years.

Such safe­ty issues are not new.

Same prob­lems

In the East Texas town of Dev­ers, four peo­ple died when the car they were in drove into, and ignit­ed, a vapor cloud after a back­hoe had hit a pipeline, which was car­ry­ing a liq­uid mix of ethane and propane. In a press release a year after the acci­dent, the Nation­al Trans­porta­tion Safe­ty Board said it “demon­strat­ed the need for faster action by the U.S. Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion on a series of pipeline safe­ty rec­om­men­da­tions dat­ing back more than five years.”

That was in 1976.

Near­ly 25 years lat­er, the safe­ty board is still crit­i­ciz­ing the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment for fail­ing to prop­er­ly reg­u­late pipelines and imple­ment impor­tant safe­ty measures. 

Tes­ti­fy­ing before Con­gress last year, Jim Hall, the safe­ty board chair­man, said a “lack of action” by the Research and Spe­cial Pro­grams Admin­is­tra­tion, which is part of the Office of Pipeline Safe­ty, “con­tin­ues to place the Amer­i­can peo­ple at risk.” He said the agency has one of the worst records in imple­ment­ing NTSB safe­ty rec­om­men­da­tions, 68.9 per­cent, and that sev­er­al such rec­om­men­da­tions made in 1992 are still not imple­ment­ed. He told the Boston Globe last year that he’d give the Office of Pipeline Safe­ty “a big fat F on every­thing they’ve done.” 

Lois Epstein, an engi­neer with the Envi­ron­men­tal Defense Fund who sits on the fed­er­al advi­so­ry com­mit­tee that over­sees pipelines, said “pipelines are one of the last fron­tiers of envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion because so many oth­er envi­ron­men­tal threats have been addressed. But pipelines haven’t been at all.”

Kel­ley Coyn­er, head of the Research and Spe­cial Pro­grams Admin­is­tra­tion, said at a press con­fer­ence last week that that is about to change.

“This sum­mer we will see a major over­haul of our safe­ty stan­dards,” she said. “The pipeline safe­ty leg­is­la­tion that the vice pres­i­dent has pro­posed rais­es the lev­el of resources not only for the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment but for the state gov­ern­ments to make sure pipelines are safe.”

And she said the agency would “work on how we pro­tect pipelines from out­side force dam­age. That is a shared respon­si­bil­i­ty of the com­pa­nies and the com­mu­ni­ties around the pipelines. We have to crack the nut of how we deal with corrosion.”

The bud­get of the Office of Pipeline Safe­ty dou­bled from $16 mil­lion in 1995 to $32 mil­lion the next year, when a propane gas leak in San Juan, Puer­to Rico, led to an explo­sion that killed 33 and injured 69. Its bud­get for this year is $36.7 million.

This year the law that allows Con­gress to fund the agency expires, and politi­cians, such as Gore and Mur­ray, are dis­cussing how the agency should oper­ate. Michele Joy, the gen­er­al coun­sel of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Oil Pipelines, said the indus­try was still “in the process of digest­ing” the pro­pos­al and has not yet tak­en a position.

But over­com­ing the influ­ence of the oil and gas lob­by may be dif­fi­cult. The indus­try gave more than $22 mil­lion in the 1998 con­gres­sion­al elec­tion, accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Respon­sive Pol­i­tics. Enron Corp., which is one of Gov. George W. Bush’s lead­ing con­trib­u­tors, gave more than $1 mil­lion. U.S. Sen. Kay Bai­ley Hutchi­son and U.S. Reps. Joe Bar­ton and Kay Granger were among the top recip­i­ents of the indus­try’s dona­tions. Bar­ton is the chair­man of the House com­merce sub­com­mit­tee on ener­gy and pow­er, which already approved leg­is­la­tion reau­tho­riz­ing the Office of Pipeline Safety.

Gore’s pro­pos­al is sim­i­lar to the leg­is­la­tion filed in Jan­u­ary by Mur­ray, the Wash­ing­ton sen­a­tor, because it would give the states more author­i­ty to inspect pipelines.

In most cas­es only Office of Pipeline Safe­ty inspec­tors can inspect inter­state lines. The states are respon­si­ble for those lines that stay entire­ly with­in their bor­ders. In 1996, Car­ole Kee­ton Rylan­der — who at the time was chair­woman of the Texas Rail­road Com­mis­sion, the state agency that over­sees intrastate pipelines — asked the Office of Pipeline Safe­ty if her office could inspect those lines that cross state lines. Texas has 30 inspectors. 

But the pipeline agency denied that request. And recent­ly it also told Ari­zona and Neva­da that they could no longer inspect their inter­state lines.

“It makes no sense what­so­ev­er,” said Ter­ry Fron­ter­house, Ari­zon­a’s chief pipeline inspec­tor and pres­i­dent of the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Pipeline Safe­ty Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, which rep­re­sents state pipeline agen­cies. “The states are the ones who should be able to do it, and here’s why: The states have the peo­ple on board to do the inspec­tions. The state peo­ple know more about what’s going on with the pipelines because the state peo­ple are all over the state on a dai­ly basis. We have 11 inspec­tors in Ari­zona; they have zero.” 

Under Gore’s plan, fines for spills would be increased from $25,000 to $500,000. Bush has not pro­posed a spe­cif­ic pipeline safe­ty plan, but a spokesman said Bush believes the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment should work close­ly with state and local offi­cials on the issue. 

Gore’s announce­ment fol­lows one of the largest civ­il fines ever under the Clean Water Act. In Jan­u­ary, Car­ol Brown­er, the admin­is­tra­tor of the EPA, announced that the agency had reached a $35 mil­lion set­tle­ment with Koch Indus­tries, one of the largest pipeline com­pa­nies in the coun­try. The EPA had sued Koch for pipeline spills that pol­lut­ed water­ways in Texas, Okla­homa, Kansas, Alaba­ma, Louisiana and Missouri.

There were 106 spills in 28 Texas coun­ties from 1990 to 1997. Texas will receive about $17.5 mil­lion of the set­tle­ment to help clean up oil spills and pro­tect coastal water­ways, bays and estu­ar­ies vul­ner­a­ble to pollution.

Amer­i­can-States­man Wash­ing­ton Staff writer Jeff Nesmith con­tributed to this report.