The government needs to fully evaluate all the issues and reject pipelines when necessary

Essay by S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County WV, July 30, 2018

The word in a businessman’s mind only has to duplicate the real world to the extent of making profit. Unfortunately, for society as a whole, a lot of other aspects of the real world are important.

One illustration of real word discord between the abstraction of the folks that sit in air-conditioned offices in summer and heated offices in winter and think about how to make a profit, given certain assets, came to me a few days ago. A timber man was telling about his last job. He’d paid to cut and remove a stand of timber, gotten in all the paperwork, satisfied the inspector about his haul roads, and all that, and gotten into the job.

Then a pipeline company had sent a representative through and told him he would have to stop, they were going to clear a right of way for one of the 42 inch pipelines. He quit, and they cut the right of way and piled the trees alongside their clearing. When he was released to go back to it, the timber was worthless. He’d paid for it, the farmer got damages, the pipeline company wouldn’t let him clear the right of way, and to add insult to injury, the standards for their access roads wasn’t near as stringent as for his!

Laying pipelines in country where there are steep grades, rock layers near the surface and karst limestone is not the same as laying pipe in deep soil, in relatively level country. When they have to anchor the backhoe digging the trench by running a cable to a dozer with its blade dug in upslope it’s not only life-threatening for the operators, but beyond restoration. I’ve seen rock-cutting grind wheels on dozers in place of the blade, and seen rock-cutting grind wheels on the arm of backhoes.

Tell me, when they cut a path up a hillside and lift the rock out, how are they going to fill back in? Keep in mind this is on slopes over 30 degrees, sometimes 60 degrees or more. I’ll tell you, they are going to throw back the big rough rock! So there is an underground channel four or more feet wide, perhaps eight feet deep carrying water below the surface. And there will be spots where the anti-rust coating on the outside is cut through. The diversion ditches on the uphill side simply dump storm water into the pipeline trench. God help the natives!

If much of the fill in those deep ditches is woods soil, it won’t be so hard on the pipe anti-rust coating, but will be constantly soft and if a long unsecured section will be inclined to slip out, with or without the pipe. At the bottom the water will come out and enter a natural stream. At this point the question becomes how to avoid sediment if the fill does stay in place. These big pipelines are hundreds of miles long and hundreds of ups and downs have draining streams. A lot of landscape is involved.

What about karst landscape? This is limestone, very hard to dig, but full of cracks through which slightly acid surface water sinks. In such places caves form, and collapse to make sinkholes. What will happen in such places where pipelines are laid? They will certainly affect drainage. And may cave in in sections.

These are generalizations easily ignored at the top office. They draw a line on the map where it will be allowed and make the most money. Engineers for the companies that do the work have their work cut out for them. The construction company has to agree to build it where the pipeline company wants it to go, or the pipeline company gets some other company to do the work. Then the engineers have to draw up the plans – or look for another job. Everybody is constrained to least cost. It is cheaper to not look at finer detail.

Then there is the minutia the engineers miss. A recent 36 inch pipe went a few miles west of where I live. Here are two examples of things I observed that the engineers ought to have known better. In one place instead of going to the bottom of a gully, they made a fill and put in a culvert, then laid the pipeline in the fill above the culvert. The watershed above the culvert is not so large the culvert won’t carry the water, but it is wooded. That means there will constantly be small branches washing down to block that culvert. If it isn’t checked several times a year it, it can get blocked and the fill washed so the pipe is exposed or even undercut.

Further south there is a place where that pipeline goes straight down a steep grade for a mile or more. Each of the storm water diversions goes the same distance off the line, so each one adds its load of diverted storm water to what has come from upslope. This will build up a large load tending to make a gulley.

Most folks have no idea of the scale of the pipelines, the compressor stations, the access roads, the rights of way. If you get fracking newsletters it helps.

Some have, lets say, contact with Marcellus Air which takes many, many quality aerial photographs of installations and wells and pipelines in progress. Many include enough of the surroundings to see the neighborhoods, pointing out schools, housing developments, where people are. These newsletters also regularly include photographs showing the pollutant haze that hangs over the Marcellus gas field.

You can go to Google Earth or Apple’s similar application and look for fracking damage in an area. I like the Apple app because the satellite photos are clear summer pictures, no clouds with leaves on. If you have it, try “Hurst Hollow Road.” It shows a compressor station in SW Harrison County, WV, with the recent pipeline installation, not yet grassed over. You can follow it miles north to Jarvisville, where there is another pump station, on north to the four lane US Route 50 west of Clarksburg. Here the line becomes less distinct. Reduce the scale and you can see the veins and pimples of fracking in many places on the countryside.

The reply from the big boys who play their profit game from air-conditioned rooms, mentioned above, would be, “Aahh, lots of trees left in the countryside!” But they ignore the fact the trees have a very important job: they provide oxygen and remove pollutants from the air, not the least of them carbon and nitrogen oxides. Each 44 tons of carbon dioxide they remove from the air provides 32 tons of pure oxygen. Twelve tons of carbon is stored in wood and the soil. Twenty five percent of what we humans put into the air is removed by trees now. They do it with free energy from the sun with no cost and no planning and no labor. Over a 50-year lifespan, a tree generates almost $32,000 worth of oxygen, providing $62,000 worth of air pollution control. Pretty good deal!

The Mountain Valley Pipeline will have no odorant. That means leaks cannot be smelled by locals living near it!

Think of the recent big explosion of the new LeachXPress pipeline that occurred near Moundsville WV after only 6 months after start up. It had recently had a “pig run,” a device sent through it to inspect it, and wasn’t even up to full operating pressure. The cause was a landslide where the pipeline traverses a steep hill. They lost $437,250 worth of gas. The Follansbee explosion of 2015 is blamed on a landslide, too.

Inspection of welds is a weak spot. Lots of welds, all around the pipe, in a ditch often on steep hillsides, must be very strong to hold natural gas at several tens of times atmospheric pressure.

This construction is useless when the gas is gone. In a few years grass and shrubs cover the pipeline right of way, but they don’t remove as much pollution from the air, and much of that goes back to carbon dioxide soon. It takes 70 years or more for mature trees to come back.

The access roads are covered deeply with crushed rock, as are the well pads. Those will be kept bare a decade or two, and many more decades will be required for establishment of new forest cover.

The pump stations will fall into disuse eventually. Maybe the heavy metal will be extracted for salvage, but the buildings will be abandoned, leaving the neighborhood a mess. The companies will go out of existence before proper reclamation, or they will be excused from reclamation. Like coal and railroads, the litter will dominate the neighborhoods indefinitely.

Enthusiasm wanes with time, as does profit. Investors move on and their gain can’t be tapped against the public loss and private loss, such as spoiled water wells and useless land. Loss of property value to individuals is over looked. Facts are distorted. Legislation is bought and lax enforcement is ignored.

We humans have seen environmental disaster before. But never before with climate change, exploding populations, world wide resource exhaustion, and misinformation on a colossal scale simultaneously. We have widely turned off citizens, too. How will it end? We can only guess, but it doesn’t look like there is any chance of a “soft landing.”

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See also a personal story now unfolding:

High up on a hill (With VIDEO)| register-herald.com

Pipeline leaks, fires, & explosions more likely in rough terrain

From Jenny Mandel and Mike Soraghan, E&E News, July 13, 2018

Federal regulators yesterday said that land movement may have triggered a natural gas pipeline explosion at a remote West Virginia site last month and that similar conditions exist at a half dozen other spots along the line.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration warned TransCanada yesterday that it intends to impose new safety-related requirements on a portion of the Leach XPress pipeline in response to the risk of land subsidence, which might have been responsible for an explosion last month that blew an 83-foot section of pipe into the air, released 165 million cubic feet (mmcf) of natural gas and triggered a fireball that burned for several hours.

The incident took place in a remote area and no injuries or damage to private property was reported (Greenwire, June 7).

PHMSA’s notice of proposed safety order, issued to TransCanada Corp. subsidiary Columbia Gas Transmission LLC, points to geological factors in the incident and could pose a challenge for other projects proposed for construction in similar steep, unstable Appalachian terrain. The pipeline that failed was constructed last year and went into service early this year, raising questions around why it failed so quickly and dramatically.

“The preliminary investigation suggests that the failure was the result of land subsidence causing stress on a girth weld,” PHMSA said in the notice. An initial report on the incident filed by TransCanada and released earlier this week notes the cause of the failure as a landslide not related to heavy rains or floods.

“Since the failure, TransCanada has identified six other points along the pipeline that, based on their geotechnical flyover, are areas of concern to the existence of large spoil piles, steep slopes, or indications of slips,” it said.

Those six additional locations, combined with the fact that the pipeline was operating well below its maximum rated pressure when the explosion took place, led PHMSA to conclude that “the continued operation of the affected segment, without corrective measures, poses a pipeline integrity risk to public safety, property and the environment.”

PHMSA’s notice of proposed safety order comes more than a month after the explosion.

Inspections, analyses and enhanced monitoring

The order does not reflect a completed investigation of the incident but puts TransCanada on notice that PHMSA intends to impose new safety-related requirements in light of what is now known about the incident. It also spells out a series of inspections and analyses that the company must conduct.

PHMSA proposes to require that TransCanada conduct extra surveillance and analysis of the roughly 50-mile section of the pipeline system that runs through terrain similar to that in the area where the rupture took place.

The Leach XPress pipeline system consists of 36-inch and 30-inch diameter carbon steel pipe that carries natural gas about 130 miles from Majorsville, W.Va., to Crawford, Ohio. The section of the route that PHMSA called out “runs along several hills and ridges with steep elevation changes.” The rupture took place near Moundsville, W.Va., on a feature known as Nixon Ridge.

TransCanada has 30 days to review the proposed safety order and request “informal consultation” about the agency’s proposed remedy and may also request a hearing to contest the facts and actions laid out by the regulator.

PHMSA recently committed to providing public notice of its hearings for pipeline safety enforcement actions, but it was not immediately clear if a hearing on the safety order would also be publicly announced under the same commitment (Energywire, July 5).

Barring changes to the proposed safety order, TransCanada has 30 days before requirements for enhanced monitoring in that higher-risk area kick in, and 45 days to install extra gauges to monitor for pipeline stress. Other requirements of the order include conducting a range of assessments of the pipeline segment that ruptured and of conditions at the time of the incident, and completing a root cause failure analysis.

TransCanada has already completed “minor repair work and grading of the failure site,” PHMSA noted. Service on portions of the Leach XPress line has been restored following an initial shutdown. TransCanada initially told customers it would resume full service on the line in early July but later pushed that timeline back to midmonth.

‘A minor miracle‘ — Opponents of two pipelines being built through the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and West Virginia said authorities need to take another look at the approvals for those projects in light of the explosion.

“If things are likely to blow up, that’s certainly something they should take into account in their analysis going forward,” said David Sligh, an environmental attorney for Wild Virginia fighting the Atlantic Coast pipeline, a 600-mile system to run from northern West Virginia to North Carolina. “Thank God that one wasn’t next to someone’s house. Some of these are.”

The developers of the Atlantic Coast pipeline said they are confident that the project is safe. “Dominion Energy will review and learn from the PHMSA safety order,” said Jen Kostyniuk, spokeswoman for Dominion Energy, the lead company on the project. She said the company and its construction contractor “have more than 200 years’ experience safely building pipelines in steep mountainous terrains all across the United States,” including more than 2,000 miles in the mountains of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

Roberta Bondurant, a lawyer fighting the Mountain Valley pipeline, a 300-mile pipeline to run from northern West Virginia to southern Virginia, agreed that the terrain is “a huge concern.” She said there have already been landslides during construction, including one that blocked a road.

Cat McCue, a spokeswoman for Appalachian Voices,` said the proposed projects are the largest-diameter pipelines ever to be built across rugged sections of the Allegheny and Blue Ridge mountains.

“It’s a minor miracle no one was injured or killed in that explosion. Are the MVP and ACP companies asking landowners in the path of these massive industrial projects to count on miracles to keep their families safe for the next 30, 40 years?” she asked.

Bill Limpert lives on the front line of that development, as the Atlantic Coast pipeline is slated to run along a mountain ridge on his property in Bath County, Va., coming within 250 feet of a landslide that occurred three years ago.

Limpert said a PHMSA inspector visited the property last year and dismissed concerns about landslides.

“His only comment was that pipeline companies can put pipelines about anywhere they want these days,” Limpert recalled. “That sounded to me like the pipeline company’s running the show.”

Click here for the notice of proposed safety order.

Leach Xpress 30 inch Pipeline explodes in WV

From an Article by Chris Lawrence in WV Metro News, June 07, 2018

Photo: Flames shoot hundreds of feet into the air until gas service was cut off following explosion Thursday morning

MOUNDSVILLE, W.Va. — The cause of a gas line explosion in Marshall County from early Thursday morning remained under investigation hours after the ensuing fire was out. Investigators from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and Trans-Canada remained on the scene Thursday.

The blast happened along Trans-Canada’s Midstream Pipeline around 4 a.m. Thursday. The fire cast a glow hundreds of feet into the air which was seen and heard for miles. When the sun rose, the immediate area of the explosion and fire revealed the results of the intense heat from the blaze.

“There were calls going into Ohio County, Wetzel County and across the river in Belmont and Monroe County, Ohio and also into Greene and Washington Counties in Pennsylvania,” said Marshall County Emergency Services Director Tom Hart. “It could be heard and seen for miles and a lot of people could actually feel the roar and said it was like an airplane going over their house.”

Fortunately, the explosion happened in a rural area where there were no homes or other structures. Although there were a few people in the vicinity of the blast, nobody was hurt. According to Hart, the line hadn’t been in service very long.

“There are parts of it that were still under construction,” said Hart. “It was a fairly new line and it was a 36 inch line.”

TransCanada was able to shut down the pressure on the line remotely which allowed the fire to burn out. Firefighters surrounded and secured the area, but since it was in a remote location and posed no threat to property or people, Hart said they simply stood back until the subsequent fire burned off.

“We were very fortunate there were no injuries involved in this incident and it was in a rural location and not in a heavily populated area in Marshall County,” Hart said.

TransCanada released the following statement Thursday afternoon:

At approximately 4:15 a.m. Eastern Time on June 7, 2018 there was a natural gas pipeline rupture on TransCanada’s Columbia Gas Transmission System on Nixon Ridge in Marshall County, West Virginia.

As soon as the issue was identified, emergency response procedures were enacted and the segment of impacted pipeline was isolated shortly after. The fire was fully extinguished by approximately 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. There were no injuries involved with this incident.

The cause of this issue is not yet known. The site of the incident has been secured and we are beginning the process of working with applicable regulators to investigate, including the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

Ten acres burned over in northern panhandle