http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36761-i-was-sick-for-a-year-after-the-yellowstone-oil-spill-five-years-later-pipeline-accidents-are-worsening
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I Was Sick for a Year After an Oil Spill. Five Years Later, Pipeline
Accidents Are Worsening
Sunday, 10 July 2016 00:00 By Alexis Bonogofsky, Truthout | Report
Early in the morning on July 2, 2011, I walked down the gravel road on
our Montana farm to let the goats out to graze for the day. I found an
oily rainbow sheen on the Yellowstone River flowing through our hay
fields and pasture, plus large clumps of crude oil sticking to trees,
cattails and brush. The oily water was in our sloughs, our pond and the
creek that runs along the eastern edge of the farm. I checked the local
news on my phone and found that an Exxon oil pipeline had ruptured
underneath the Yellowstone River upstream. More than 300 people upstream
from us were evacuated, but no one had thought to notify those of us
further from the spill. The smell of hydrocarbons was overwhelming.
In the end, more than 63,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the
Yellowstone River from what we later learned was a "guillotine cut" in
Exxon's Silvertip pipeline, which lay in a trench only four to five feet
under the Yellowstone River. Snowmelt combined with spring rains had
caused heavy flooding, and the river bottom was scoured away, leaving
the oil pipeline exposed. All it took was a heavy object being tossed
down the river to break the pipeline in half. After spending $135
million on the cleanup, Exxon recovered less than 1 percent of the oil
spilled.
It took Exxon over an hour to completely shut down the pipeline,
according to the report filed by federal regulators. Federal
investigators found that damage would have been reduced by about two
thirds if the pipeline controllers in Houston had closed the appropriate
valve as soon as a problem was detected. It took them three days to
assemble a full cleanup response team.
On July 4, 2011, my mother drove me to the hospital because I was
suffering from nausea, a severe headache that hadn't gone away in two
days, dizziness and painful breathing. The doctor diagnosed me with
acute hydrocarbon exposure, and for one year after the spill it hurt my
lungs to take a deep breath. We are on year five now of trying to
rebuild our soil and restore our pastures back to their original condition.
After the spill, the state of Montana leaned on the Pipeline and
Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal agency
responsible for inspection of pipelines and enforcement of pipeline
regulations, to inspect 90 sites where pipelines crossed rivers in
Montana. Twenty of those crossings were deemed a high risk for failure
and the pipes there were either reburied deep underneath the river with
directional drilling or strengthened.
And yet four years later, in January 2015, another oil pipeline burst
underneath the Yellowstone. Sonar testing showed that about 110 feet of
pipeline was exposed along the bottom of the river. In one area, river
scour had removed almost an entire foot of dirt and rocks underneath the
pipe, leaving it exposed top and bottom for 22 feet. Up to 54,000
gallons of oil spilled into the icy Yellowstone River. The residents in
Glendive began smelling oil in their tap water, but no one was told to
stop drinking the water until 24 hours after the spill. Volatile organic
chemicals in the oil, including cancer-causing benzene, were found in
Glendive's water supply. Very little of the oil was recovered before the
ice broke up and spring flows washed the oil downstream.
This pipeline, according to the inspections by PHMSA after the 2011
spill, was deemed a pipeline at low risk for failure.
Luckily, no one was killed in these two incidents in Montana, but oil
and gas pipeline failures around the country have caused many deaths, as
well as water pollution and billions of dollars in property damage.
The State of Pipeline Safety in the United States
A year before the 2011 oil spill on the Yellowstone River, a 30-inch
natural gas pipeline owned by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) exploded
in San Bruno, California, a suburb of San Francisco. The explosion and
fire killed eight people and injured 58 while destroying 38 homes and
damaging 70 others.
In an opening statement about the San Bruno accident report, the
National Transportation Safety Board chairman summarized the board's
findings as "troubling revelations ... about a company that exploited
weaknesses in a lax system of oversight and government agencies that
placed a blind trust in operators to the detriment of public safety."
At the time of the San Bruno blast, just 2,000 miles away in Michigan
workers were still cleaning up another pipeline break, which spilled
840,000 gallons of crude oil into the Kalamazoo River in 2010, the
largest inland oil spill in the nation's history.
The list of pipeline failures goes on and on.
The US energy pipeline network has more than 2.6 million miles of
pipeline transporting natural gas, oil and other hazardous liquids, and
the mileage is increasing every year. The creation of more pipelines --
combined with aging pipeline infrastructure and lax oversight of
pipeline companies -- has led to an increase in pipeline failures.
Oil spills from pipelines are also on the rise. Since 2009, the annual
number of significant accidents on oil and petroleum pipelines in the
United States rose by almost 60 percent, according to an analysis of
federal data by the Associated Press. The increasing number of accidents
parallels an increase in oil production in the US. The analysis also
found that nearly two-thirds of the leaks during that time have been
linked to corrosion or failures of material, welding or equipment.
From 2005 to mid-year 2016, the total cost of significant pipeline
failure incidents was over $10 billion. These incidents took the lives
of 153 people and caused more than 647 injuries. PHMSA defines a
significant incident as an event that includes any of the following
conditions: fatality or injury requiring in-patient hospitalization,
$50,000 or more in total costs measured in 1984 dollars, highly volatile
liquid releases of 5 barrels of more or liquid releases of 50 barrels or
more or a liquid release resulting in a fire or explosion.
To oversee these 2.6 million miles of pipeline, PHMSA only has 139
federal inspection and enforcement staff members, with the help of 300
state inspectors. They regulate nearly 3,000 companies, 118 liquefied
natural gas plants and 6,970 hazardous liquid breakout tanks.
The five years between 2010 and 2015 found the public experiencing
serious pipeline failures throughout the nation including the
high-profile oil spills and natural gas explosions in Montana, Michigan,
Arkansas, California and elsewhere.
On January 3, 2012, President Obama signed the Pipeline Safety,
Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011. The act contained a
range of provisions addressing pipeline safety, including increasing the
number of federal pipeline safety inspectors, requiring automatic
shutoff valves for transmission pipelines, mandating verification of
maximum allowable operating pressure for gas transmission pipelines, and
increasing civil penalties for pipeline safety violations. Five years
and many pipeline failures later, almost half of the mandates remain
incomplete beyond the deadlines specified in the act, including several
mandates that have the potential to have large impacts on pipeline
safety nationwide.
For example, a provision that would require automatic shutoff valves for
transmission pipelines, which would help to quickly stop the
uncontrolled flow of crude oil or natural gas in the event of a pipeline
failure, has not been implemented. The delay in shutting down pipelines
has made many spills worse. In San Bruno, it took PG&E over 90 minutes
to stop the flow of natural gas from the pipeline using manual valves.
In Montana's 2011 oil spill, it took Exxon over an hour to shut down the
pipeline that was gushing oil into the Yellowstone River.
Despite the 2012 bill's 42 mandates for PHMSA, pipeline failures have
continued increasing in the years since.
The Limits of Federal Regulations
Referencing the major failures between 2010 and 2015, Carl Weimer,
executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust -- an industry and
government watchdog organization that I joined the board of after my own
experience with the Yellowstone River oil spill -- testified in front of
the House Energy and Commerce Committee concerning the reauthorization
of the Department of Transportation's Pipeline Safety Program: "Against
that backdrop of incidents and congressional directives, [National
Transportation Safety Board] and [Government Accountability Office]
recommendations, those five years also provided a perfect example of a
broken regulatory process that left PHMSA incapable of producing a
single major new safety rule."
In early June 2016, President Obama signed the PIPES Act, which added
additional regulations into pipeline law and reauthorized PHMSA. This
act strengthens some regulations and increases scrutiny on pipeline
operators. For example, it includes a new regulation that allows PHMSA
to issue an emergency order to all pipeline companies when it observes a
problem with a particular pipeline that could be dangerous for other
pipelines in similar situations. In the past, regulators could issue an
order only to a particular violator. The bill also requires companies to
have a plan in place for an oil spill that happens under ice, similar to
the oil spill in Glendive, Montana.
In addition, the PIPES Act specifies that the Government Accountability
Office (GAO) is required to report on the way companies manage hazardous
liquid pipelines in "high consequence areas." PHMSA defines high
consequence areas as having one of three characteristics: being a
populated area, serving as the source for drinking water or being an
unusually sensitive ecological area. The PIPES Act also requires the GAO
to study how operators manage pipelines that cross water and the impact
of pipeline age on failures. The bill also requires better monitoring by
companies during flood events.
When Rebecca Craven, program director for the Pipeline Safety Trust, was
asked by the Billings Gazette about the impact of the new regulations,
she called them "incremental improvements," but said that companies'
spills and lack of preparedness during the spills and gas explosions
isn't necessarily from the lack of federal regulations. Companies were
already required under federal law to assess risks, prepare plans for
adverse conditions to their pipelines and undertake measures to minimize
those risks.
One of the biggest gaps in pipeline safety that the Pipeline Safety
Trust has identified, yet still hasn't been addressed in any federal
regulation, concerns the effects of oil spills and gas releases on human
health.
On June 12, 2010, a Chevron oil pipeline spilled oil into the Red Butte
Creek drainage in Salt Lake City for the second time in a year, spilling
50-60 gallons of crude oil into the creek each minute. An order from
PHMSA noted that Chevron did not respond to the pipeline break for more
than 10 hours. An estimated 33,600 gallons of crude had been spilled,
exposing 190 residences and numerous businesses to the fumes. One of
those residences belonged to Peter Hayes, who lived along the creek.
According to those who knew him, Hayes was extremely concerned about the
oil spill's effects on the people who lived along Red Butte Creek. He
advocated for the creation of improved emergency response plans and for
a study to determine the long-term health impacts of being exposed to
crude oil. His recommendations were never put into practice.
A little more than five years later, on September 15, 2015, Hayes died
from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a rare lung disease that suffocates
a person by destroying the tissues that distribute oxygen into the
bloodstream. Some believe Hayes' disease may have been caused by
exposure to the volatile organic compounds released by the oil spill. He
was 60 years old.
After most oil pipeline spills and natural gas explosions, people have
reported adverse health effects from the spills, and yet no studies have
been done on the long-term health impacts of these incidents.
On October 23, 2015, a massive natural gas leak was discovered by
Southern California Gas Company employees in Aliso Canyon in California.
Gas was being released from the underground natural gas storage
facility, the second largest facility of its kind in the United States.
The gas spewed into the atmosphere for more than 100 days. People who
lived nearby the facility reported "headaches, nosebleeds, nausea and
other symptoms to county officials."
"We're dealing with a gap in the science," said Michael Jerrett,
professor and chairman of the Department of Environmental Health
Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, while speaking to
InsideClimate News about the Aliso Canyon failure. "We just don't have a
very good scientific understanding of what that means for long-term
health effects."
As Weimer from the Pipeline Safety Trust told Congress this year just
before the reauthorization, "We ask that as part of this reauthorization
you direct PHMSA to undertake another study with the National Academy of
Sciences to better understand the potential long-term health effects
from pipeline failures, and provide recommendations for threshold levels
that should inform evacuation decisions and necessary equipment to
measure such thresholds as part of spill response plans."
However, Congress didn't include any directive to study health impacts
from pipeline failures in its legislation.
In the last five years, Congress has passed two bills tightening
pipeline regulations and giving more authority to PHMSA to enforce those
regulations. After the passage of the 2012 bill, pipeline failures
continued increasing, making many skeptical that the 2016 legislation
will be effective in stopping pipeline failures.
Carl Weimer from the Pipeline Safety Trust summarized what he saw in the
new pipeline regulation bill:
The reality of the bill is somewhat different than the much
ballyhooed claims. While there is not a single provision in the pipeline
safety reauthorization bill that by itself creates substantial progress
to increase the safety of the pipelines in this country, the bill does
have many incremental provisions that taken as a whole move pipeline
safety forward. There are a few good provisions, others that provide
needed clarity, and some that just encourage efforts already under way
at PHMSA. With the current Congress our expectations were low, so we
were quite happy that Congress worked together in a bipartisan way to
exceed our expectations.
As I walk through my farm and see the weeds, the dead soil and oil lines
left on the old cottonwood trees, I think about the large part of my
life that I've spent dealing with an oil spill that I wouldn't have had
to deal with if the Exxon Pipeline Company had been forced to follow the
regulations already in place. I think about my lungs and I wonder what
damage was done that I might experience when I'm older. I think about
Peter Hayes.
I know that most pipelines underneath the Yellowstone River are still at
risk from scour and that none of the new regulations will fix that
problem, since current regulations only require pipelines under rivers
wider than 100 feet to be buried between 4 and 6 feet. Because of this,
I know that I will most likely experience another pipeline failure on
the Yellowstone in my lifetime.
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