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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.""
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."
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!
"Not to be dismissive"... And now I'll be dismissive.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Except that the town wasn't screwed up - a well outside of town was on fire for several days. One person (an employee) unfortunately did die. The payoff was for the noise and inconvenience not due to any contamination. Then, some ant-drilling group posted some petition showing that the residents were pissed off. The only problem? Nobody in the town had actually signed it. Here's the link: http://www.businessweek.com/ap.... You may want to read your news more critically and not jump on the internet's immediate "omg, evil corporation" crap that seems to fester immediately when some news comes up.
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.
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.
TFA says 70 barrels, not gallons. A barrel is 31.5 gallons.
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.