Texas Eastern 30 inch Natural Gas Pipeline explodes of unknown cause

From an Article by Bill Estep, Mike Stunson, and Rebekah Alvey, Lexington Herald-Leader, August 02, 2019

The NTSB is investigating after a gas pipeline exploded, destroying homes, killing a woman and injuring several others early Thursday in Lincoln County, authorities said.

The explosion occurred in the Indian Camp Trailer Park about 1:20 a.m. just outside Junction City, Kentucky, and flames shot up 300 feet in the air, according to Lincoln County Emergency Management director Don Gilliam.

The fire — that could be seen dozens of miles away in Lexington and other communities — engulfed some homes and damaged others while residents fled. Nine homes were destroyed or extensively damaged, Gilliam said.

“We are immensely sorry,” said Devin Hotzel, spokesman for Enbridge, the parent company of Texas Eastern that owns the line. He apologized during a meeting Thursday night to help affected residents with their immediate housing, food and medication needs.

Lisa Denise Derringer, 58, was killed, the Lincoln County coroner’s office told WKYT. An autopsy was scheduled for Thursday, Kentucky State Police Trooper Robert Purdy said. Her daughter, Candy Ellis, wrote on Facebook that her mother called in her last moments. “She called me but couldn’t speak this morning,” Ellis said. “I have to believe that her heart was at peace when I was calling her name.”

At least five were injured in the blast, Gilliam said. The injuries did not appear to be life-threatening. Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center in Danville treated five injured victims and four were released, a spokesperson said.

Kentucky State Police Trooper Robert Purdy describes how a deputy rescued two people who were in danger after a gas pipeline explosion in Lincoln County Ky., on Aug. 1, 2019.

One of the injured was a Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy who helped rescue an elderly man and woman. “Without him being there at the right time, we could have had more casualties than what we had,” Purdy said of the deputy.

Although up to seven people were unaccounted for in the early hours after the blast, by noon Thursday, all had been located, Purdy said. The fire was out by 8 a.m., Purdy said. Anything within 500 yards of the fire and explosion had some kind of damage, he added.

Of the nine hardest hit homes, five were destroyed and four were extensively damaged. More received less serious damage. Others were uninhabitable temporarily with water and electric service turned off. Enbridge will provide assistance, including temporary housing, to victims if needed, Hotzel said.

”There is just nothing left,” Gilliam said of some of the homes.

Initial reports indicated a gas line had ruptured, triggering the blast. Victims were amazed they survived the inferno. “It was either stay and burn up or run and burn up,” said Denver Coulter whose home burned. “I still don’t see how we got out alive.”

Judy Gooch was jolted from her bed by a “horrendous” roaring sound at her mobile home and when she looked outside it was like daylight, she said. The home was shaking. “We just saw flames shooting up over the roof. The air was so hot it would take your breath,” Gooch said. She and her 16-year-old granddaughter escaped in their car. “There was a lot of people running from the fire,” and to the road, she said.

New Hope Baptist Church served as a shelter for fire victims and those who left their surrounding houses in fear after the mobile home park blast. Initally, about 75 people were sent to the church, Lincoln County Deputy Jim Vines said. A 1.5 mile stretch of U.S. 127 between Junction City and Hustonville also was temporarily closed, Vines added.

Some affected residents at Thursday night’s meeting were petrified to return to their homes and received assurances they could. “Everybody … is scared to death that it’s going to happen again,” said Mary Jo Wood whose home was destroyed.

The 30-inch ruptured gas line that caused the explosion was shut off afterward, according to James McGuffey, Enbridge area manager. The company had multiple representatives at the site. A cause for the rupture was not immediately known, and it could take several days to determine, he added.

The pipeline was one of three in the area, according to McGuffey. Pressure was decreased drastically in the other two in case they were compromised in some way by the explosion. The ruptured pipeline, a Texas Eastern transmission line, stretches more than 9,000 miles from the Mexico border in Texas to New York City.

On Jan. 21, the same natural gas pipeline exploded in Noble County, Ohio, causing the destruction of two homes and injuries to two people, according to multiple media reports. The pipeline will be the focus of the National Transportation Safety Board which said it was sending three investigators to Kentucky.

Some residents living on or near the gas lines feared an accident while others didn’t, even after Thursday’s blast. Jason Griffitts who owns a farm adjoining the mobile home park said he worries more about a train derailment from tracks that run behind the house than he worries about the three gas lines that run under the land about 460 feet away from the house.

A blast like Thursday’s is “such a rarity,” he said. He got a visit from gas company representatives previously and they instructed him on the signs — hissing, dirt blowing up, dead vegetation — of a gas leak. It’s not clear if there were any advance signs that trouble was brewing in the mobile home park before Thursday.

“It was like a rocket turned upside down.” Witness describes scene of fire. Keith Demaree lives near where a natural-gas pipeline exploded early Aug. 1 in Lincoln County, Ky., that killed one woman. He said the frightening blast sent flames shooting 300 feet high. Gilliam, the emergency manager for the county, said he wakes up in the night concerned about the pipelines.

“When you get age on ‘em, you can’t help but be concerned,” he said. “I don’t know who would want to build next to a pipeline.” Despite the death and damage, the community got lucky Thursday because the results could have been much worse, Gilliam said.

“Our prayers are with all the families whom this disaster has touched, and our gratitude is with all the first responders who rushed toward towering flames to protect their neighbors and communities,” the Kentucky Republican said.

Laura Sioux Kirkpatrick wrote on Facebook her parents lost everything in the fire. She said her mother was burned but OK. “My step dad who is a Marine said he thought it was a nuclear attack it was so bright and the house walls was just melting right in front of their eyes,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “We don’t know how they got out alive but they did barely and at one point was trapped in the house and was for sure they where not going to get out.”

The lives if real people in the USA & elsewhere are being disrupted

From an Article by Oliver Milman, The Guardian, September 24, 2018

After her house flooded for the third year in a row, Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding rains and swelling seas.

Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from the last flood, local authorities agreed this historic slice of Charleston could be torn down.

“I was sloshing through the water with my puppy dog, debris was everywhere,” she said. “I feel completely sunken. It would cost me around $500,000 to raise the house, demolish the first floor. I’m going to rent a place instead, on higher ground.”

Millions of Americans will confront similarly hard choices as climate change conjures up brutal storms, flooding rains, receding coastlines and punishing heat. Many are already opting to shift to less perilous areas of the same city, or to havens in other states. Whole towns from Alaska to Louisiana are looking to relocate, in their entirety, to safer ground.

Children on Isle De Jean Charles, Louisiana, play outside where only 20 families are left. Channels cut by loggers and oil companies eroded the island. What little remains will eventually be inundated as the sea level rises.

The era of climate migration is, virtually unheralded, already upon America.

The population shift gathering pace is so sprawling that it may rival anything in US history. “Including all climate impacts it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine something twice as large as the Dustbowl,” said Jesse Keenan, a climate adaptation expert at Harvard University, referencing the 1930s upheaval in which 2.5 million people moved from the dusty, drought-ridden plains to California.

This enormous migration will probably take place over a longer period than the Dustbowl but its implications are both profound and opaque. It will plunge the US into an utterly alien reality. “It is very difficult to model human behaviour under such extreme and historically unprecedented circumstances,” Keenan admits.

The closest analogue could be the Great Migration – a period spanning a large chunk of the 20th century when about 6 million black people departed the Jim Crow south for cities in the north, midwest and west.

By the end of this century, sea level rise alone could displace 13 million people, according to one study, including 6 million in Florida. States including Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey will also have to grapple with hordes of residents seeking dry ground.

“There’s not a state unaffected by this,” said demographer Mat Hauer, lead author of the research, which is predicated on a severe 6ft sea level increase. There are established migration preferences for some places – south Florida to Georgia, New York to Colorado – but in many cases people would uproot to the closest inland city, if they have the means.

“The Great Migration was out of the south into the industrialized north, whereas this is from every coastal place in the US to every other place in the US,” said Hauer. “Not everyone can afford to move, so we could end up with trapped populations that would be in a downward spiral. I have a hard time imagining what that future would be like.”

Within just a few decades, hundreds of thousands of homes on US coasts will be chronically flooded. By the end of the century, 6ft of sea level rise would redraw the coastline with familiar parts – such as southern Florida, chunks of North Carolina and Virginia, much of Boston, all but a sliver of New Orleans – missing. Warming temperatures will fuel monstrous hurricanes – like the devastating triumvirate of Irma, Maria and Harvey in 2017, followed by Florence this year – that will scatter survivors in jarring, uncertain ways.

The projections are starting to materialize in parts of the US, forming the contours of the climate migration to come.

“I don’t see the slightest evidence that anyone is seriously thinking about what to do with the future climate refugee stream,” said Orrin Pilkey, professor emeritus of coastal geology at Duke University. “It boggles the mind to see crowds of climate refugees arriving in town and looking for work and food.”

Pilkey’s new book – Sea Level Rise Along Americas Shores: The Slow Tsunami – envisions apocalyptic scenes where millions of people, largely from south Florida, will become “a stream of refugees moving to higher ground”.

“They will not be the bedraggled families carrying their few possessions on their backs as we have seen in countless photos of people fleeing wars and ethnic cleansing, most recently in Myanmar and Syria,” Pilkey states in his book. “Instead, they will be well-off Americans driving to a new life in their cars, with moving trucks behind, carrying a lifetime of memories and possessions.”

Dejected with frigid New York winters, Chase Twichell and her husband purchased a four-bedroom apartment in Miami Beach in 2011, with the plan of spending at least a decade basking in the sunshine. At first, keeping a pair of flip-flops on hand to deal with the flooded streets seemed an acceptable quirk, until the magnitude of the encroaching seas became apparent when the city spent $400m to elevate streets near Twichell’s abode.

Twichell began to notice water pumps were spewing plastic bags, condoms and chip packets into the bay. Friends’ balconies started getting submerged. Twichell, a poet, found apocalyptic themes creeping into her work. Last year, she sold the apartment to a French businessman and moved back to upstate New York.

“It was like end of the world stuff,” she said. “It was crazy for us to have such a big investment in such a dangerous situation.” Her neighbours initially scolded her but now several are also selling up, fretting that the real estate and insurance markets for properties like theirs will seize up.

“It was horrible but fascinating to see it,” Twichell said. “It’s like we got to see the future and it wasn’t pretty. It’s like a movie where there’s a terrible volcano that is destroying everything, only it’s much slower than that.”

A sense of fatalism is also starting to grip some local officials. Philip Stoddard, mayor of South Miami, has seen a colleague, spooked by sea level rise, move to California and some neighbours sell their houses before an expected slump in prices. Stoddard and his wife regularly discuss buying a fallback property, perhaps in Washington DC.

“Most people will wait for the problem to be bad to take action, that’s what I worry about,” he said. “We can buy a lot of time, but in the end we lose. The sea level will go over the tops of our buildings.”

Sanitation is an immediate preoccupation for Stoddard, given the large proportion of residents who aren’t served by sewage works. “If you’re using a septic tank and your toilet starts to overflow into your bathroom because of water inundation, that’s a basis-of-civilization problem,” he said. “A medieval city wasn’t a nice smelling place and they had a lot of diseases.”

Those living near the coasts will face pressures of the gradual (sea level rise) as well as dramatic (storms) nature but people inland will also be harried to move by climate change.

Farming techniques and technology have improved immeasurably since the Dustbowl but rising temperatures are still expected to diminish yields for crops such as maize, soybeans and wheat, prompting the departure of younger people from farming. By 2050, Texas county, the largest wheat-producing county in Oklahoma, could spend an extra 40 days a year above 90F (32C) compared with now.