Slashdot Mirror
It's Time To Plug the Loopholes In Pipeline Regulation
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Congresswoman Janice Hahn writes in the Daily Breeze that thousands of gallons of crude oil spilled onto a residential street in Wilmington, California when an idle pipeline burst in a residential neighborhood, wreaking havoc on the lives of families who live in the community. "With a noxious smell and the sounds of jackhammers engulfing the community, the residential neighborhood turned into a toxic waste site in less than an hour," says Hahn. "The smell was nauseating and unbearable. Extensive drilling on the street is causing damage to driveways and even cracking tile flooring inside homes. Residents have seen their lawns die within a two-week span and they worry that the soil may be toxic. Several residents have suffered from eye irritation, nausea, headaches and dizziness due to the foul oil odor, including an elderly woman who has lived in Wilmington for more than 20 years." (More, below.)
"The 10-inch pipeline is owned by Phillips 66, who initially said it was almost positive that the company was not to blame for the leak and declined to elaborate on why the unused 10-inch pipeline was filled with crude oil. Hahn says current loopholes in pipeline regulation are inexcusable and has called for a congressional hearing to examine regulations for pipeline safety and plans to introduce legislation that will specifically require that all abandoned or idle pipelines are routinely inspected. "The Wilmington community deserves answers and support from Phillips 66 and handing out gift cards and breakfast burritos to the residents is not in any way a substitute for transparency and accountability to the community," concludes Hahn. "This oil spill could have been prevented. With prudent oversight, we can make sure that the industries our communities rely on are also good neighbors and ensure that an incident like this never happens again.""
Unused pipelines sometimes get tapped between two places to transport illicit oil or other substances. Nobody ever checks in on abandoned resource assets so it's not that difficult to "squat" on them.
All the residents capable of retaining counsel and fighting a decade-long war of attrition with a superior force can simply achieve redress for this tort through the courts! (until we tort-reform that away). Any of the sickies who 'die' before 'the lawsuit even finishes 250,000 pages of discovery' clearly just didn't care enough about righting the wrongs done to them, so they probably deserve them.
After all, everyone knows that free pizza makes everything better after an event like this.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It makes me think of a episode of the daily show that was last week where a company that screwed up a town due to fracking was paying off the inhabitants of the town with pizza.
Why don't pipelines like that have passive shutoff valves every hundred feet or so, such that if the pipeline suddenly looses pressure, the valve closes and no more oil can escape than already made it into that section?
We've had those for water pipes in our homes for decades to keep the house from flooding in case of a burst. And filling your basement with water does a hell of a lot less damage than filling your basement with crude.
Of course, we all already know the answer to that. The same answer GM didn't give congress last week; the same answer we always have when talking about health and safety tradeoffs: Money.
...that the current state of regulation is some kind of mistake or oversight. Never attribute to incompetence that which can be sufficiently explained by political corruption (which is not the same as malice - it's merely self interest and indifference towards others, i.e. systematized psychopathy).
The current state of the regulations is what is intended, and only because they cannot get away with more. The board of Phillips is insulated from their actions (to not maximize safety) both from below (employee layer) and from above (corporate veil). No matter how big a spill they make and no matter what the degree of gross negligence, the worst that can possibly happen is that Phillips gets their profits reduced on a one-time basis. Nobody will ever see jail time, and this is the system working exactly as intended.
The regulators who go easy on Phillips will be offered fat-cat industry positions when the episode is over, and everybody knows it. A spill is now a payday for regulators involved. They're probably tripping over each other to get assigned to the matter. Heck, we'll probably eventually get a leak about some regulator causing a spill just so he can get a better job - because why not? That's how the incentives are aligned; that's how the current government is architected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Totally out of left field, but what can I say, my mind makes weird-sounding connections sometimes, so just hang with it for a minute..
Crude oil is nasty stuff. Nobody is arguing that point. But while people complain about that (and this case in particular, and rightly so), they're complaining about it on their computers, or on their phones, both of which have high-end semiconductor devices and batteries in them that required even more noxious, toxic, dangerous chemicals to produce -- but nobody is complaining about their phones, or computers, or their nice quiet hybrid or 100% electric car, now are they? A modern bicycle contains components that required some sort of nasty chemicals and processes to produce, but nobody thinks about that, do they? Even shoes, used to for walking of all things, the most 'green' of all transportation devices, requires some rather nauseating chemicals to produce the synthetic rubber and other synthetic materials in them.
My point here is this: Mismanagement is the problem. It's like the old argument: 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people'. Gun control advocates give you a dirty look when they hear this, but it's 100% true, now isn't it? Should we continue to transition away from fossil fuels like petroleum and coal? Absolutely! But don't forget that it's humans' management (or the lack thereof) that ends up causing many of the disasterous problems (like in this news story!) and not what's being managed.
What I'm finally leading up to is this: Things like nuclear power (which, in one form or another, whether it's fission or fusion) are, in and of themselves, not evil; it's the mismanagement of it in the past that's left the nasty taste in people's mouths and the lasting negative sentiments in their minds. If we, as a civilization, had been more thoughtful and careful with our technology, maybe this little disasters in the Los Angeles area wouldn't have happened in the first place.
Seriously, human race: It's time to grow up and start learning to put aside the base desires for power and money where the public interest is concerned and think more about what's good for our collective civilzation over the long run.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
"... including an elderly woman who has lived in Wilmington for more than 20 years."
Woohoo, twenty whole years. What exactly does elderly have to do with anything? I'm not elderly, but I've lived 'here' for 20 years, that doesn't get _me_ much of anything.
Not to be dismissive of any of the symptoms that everyone is suffering from, but in another 20 years I'll be I'll be elderly too. If I stay where I am right not, that'll be _forty_ years. If history is any indication, by then, that and $25 will get me a cup of coffee at McDonalds. And FWIW, I'm already old enough to join AARP.
That will fix everything! I'm sure the cost of food won't rise either and it won't have any effect on the economy.
Posts like this is why I don't bother with Slashdot anymore. HuffPo seems fair and balanced compared to the tripe that gets greenlit.
They can use trains instead...
Who gives a shit about that crappy town - they should be charged for recieving that free oil!
An incident in the book Early California Oil comes to mind here: after a sale of an oil tanker truck the two parties realized they weren't sure what to do with the contents of the truck - the buyer had no use for the oil. The seller thus simply emptied all the oil onto the street! The Wilmington oil field is also the poster child for oil extraction causing massive ground subsidence. Regulations were more than a bit lax back when. Occasionally people in SOCAL have to deal with this legacy - there was an explosion in a store in the 80s caused by a gas leak from a shoddy drilling operation, for instance. But generally things run relatively smoothly.
THe residents need to stop spewing anti corporate left wing radical stuff. We tried fascism before with the soviet union.
I prefer freedom instead thank you very much!
The market will take care of this only if we do not do anything. In a free market without government regulation none of these things would EVER happen.
http://saveie6.com/
Where's AL GORE?
We need to STOP GLOBAL HYDROCARBON EXTRACTION (STOP! GHE).
Al knows that's the only true solution to global warming, Stop! GHE.
But instead they just want to jack up taxes, I wonder why?
Baba Booey!
TIC
Idle pipelines are great targets for Ruger 10/22's (rifles), They meet the requirements of a great target; you shoot it and you get an indication of a hit. Not as good as blasting caps but a pipeline will do in a pinch.
Why do we need national regulations to deal with a small local problem that affects only a few people?
Is it because you have a personal hatred for one of the parties involved? Is it because you will personally gain from the regulation? Or is it because you think everything in the world needs a regulatory hand guiding it -- a government hand, with armed enforcers to punish anyone who gets out of line? Which is it?
Prior to the Olympic Pipeline explosion in Bellingham, Washington, gasoline was always cheaper there than in other parts of the state. After the imposition of a $112 million settlement on the pipeline owners, the local price of gas jumped above the state average. And it will remain there until the companies have recouped that penalty several times over.
Companies don't pay fines. The plebes do.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why the fuck weren't they evacuated?
Here's an easy fix: regulate the courts. The courts must be dangerously under-regulated if they are as inefficient as you say.
Nobody upgrades old systems unless it's going to generate new revenue or an increase in revenue. "Today's enterprise" is dramatically different than 1998. There are actually firewalls at nearly each segment enforcing rules and very specific flows of traffic.
In the technology world "pipe" upgrades and system upgrades are consistent because every 3 to 5 years old systems are replaced with new systems that have much higher throughput capabilities, leverage the same shelf space to handle more workload, in many cases leveraging a similar power and cooling requirement. This makes good business sense to a company.
I would imagine that the oil industry would replace old systems in a heart beat if they were able to get "more revenue" from an old well with brand spanking new technology. Until then, I wouldn't imagine they would change anything, as long as they don't have to. It doesn't make sense to spend money to get the same amount of oil in a day, or change out the systems of an old well with little to no more oil left in it.
It's just 70 gallons of crude oil left in an unused pipeline. No fire. No explosion. Just a mess.
It's not like a few years ago, when a high pressure gas pipeline exploded in Daly City and took out a small subdivision. Now that was a serious problem and an indication of a worse one. The column of smoke was visible 20 miles away. The state of California made PG&E do hydrostatic testing on all their major gas pipelines, over PG&E's claims that it was unnecessary. During hydrostatic testing with water, there were two pipeline bursts. One caused a landslide that blocked parts of I-280 at Woodside CA. No fire, of course; just water and mud, since this happened during testing.
The problem now is that companies have no incentive to fix the problem. Fines are minimal, and a court fight can drag out for years. First, we must make the company or companies pay all costs of cleanup, including establishing families in new homes if necessary. On top of those costs there needs to be a hefty fine so companies have an incentive to design for safety from the start.
Finally, and this is the most important, the top executives for these companies should be forced to live in these areas until the problem is fixed and live as most of the residents in terms of drinking water, air filtering, etc. Forcing top executives to live in areas where they have caused problems would be a powerful incentive for them to fix the problem.
Here's a list of nearly 300 that have happened since 2000 in the United States. That's just in the new milleneum, involving all kinds of petroleum products.
Oh yes, there's lots of problems with our pipelines. Whether more regulation is necessary, that's not my place to say. But there isan issue in how petroleum products are piped around our country. Accidents happen, like car crashes happen all the time in the vehicle pipelines we call freeways. But we have to continue to work at solving them - to ignore these problems and say "oh well" is not an option.
Those toxic polluters in government actually made their STREETS themselves out of extra-thick oil.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Congresswoman Janice Hahn declares it's the end of the world!
Why did you not do it before now. Too much oil money in your campaign fund?
Nothing solves problems quite like regulating harder.
These very same people who get so upset by crude spills, are only too happy to have bitumen covered roads to drive on and never get sick of the smell of fresh asfalt, which is really just crude oil mixed with pebbles and spread in a straight line.
Frankly i dislike oil companies a lot. I'll say that up front. But what I do see in regard to spills and leaks is the same issue that invades many other industries. Frankly people and companies simply can not afford to be responsible. Your car insurance is a great example. Most drivers have insurance that is a joke when compared to the real harm that is often done. I saw one rare recovery in which a woman was ruined for life and in a nursing home permanently at a young age. Somehow her lawyers got her a 30 million dollar settlement. But after court costs and legal fees she had a bit over 20 million and the fear was that with 20 million dollars she would run out of money as she might live a very long life requiring a lot of medical care in a skilled nursing facility. Obviously every driver could easily cause such a horror and there could be more than one person in the car that they hit. And people unlikely to be hurt often suffer serious harm. I saw what looked like an ankle that was almost sprained turn into a near death situation for a salesman. When he arrived at work and got out of his car there was a tiny surface crack in the pavement. His shoe caught a bit and he had a bit of an ouch but did not fall down. What he did not know was that he had a minor break in the leg bone. Infection was not obvious and after about four days he suddenly collapsed and went unconscious. He was at death's door. The hospital brought him out of it and after the usual fifty thousand in expenses he could go home and rest until the cast came off, If he had died that little stumble would have been enough to bankrupt most small companies. So society cheats and Workmans' Comp would step in and his family would have been cheated out of everything. If the business could be held responsible it could not exist.
My Dad won't read Wikipedia either. He gets his information from Fox News.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
This is exactly the kind of subject never to trust Wikipedia about.
The useful thing about Wikipedia is that it cites references.
It's wise not to "trust" Wikipedia-- or any single source-- but it is a good first place to go to look up references.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com