“The pipeline owned by China’s largest oil refiner, Sinopec, ruptured early Friday and leaked for about 15 minutes onto a street and into the sea before it was shut off. Hours later, as workers cleaned up the spill, the oil caught fire and exploded in two locations, the [Qingdao] government said.”
Associated Press/Canadian Press, Nov. 22
In view of our ongoing discussions about the wisdom or otherwise of oil pipeline expansion in British Columbia, wouldn’t you think a story like this would have generated front-page headlines in our daily media?
Accompanied by disturbing photos of the devastation caused by the blasts, ongoing AP/CP bulletins tell us the death toll has risen to 52, 11 people are missing and the number of the known injured is hovering around 166. About 18,000 nearby residents were evacuated to a safe zone.
As is usual in such chaos, time alone will reveal what we are allowed to know about the true cause of the pipeline rupture and subsequent explosions.
According to the AP report, the Qingdao Environmental Protection Bureau said that “. . . a mixture of gas and oil from a storm sewer exploded and caught fire over the sea. . . .”
To unskilled eyes, the online photos suggest a lot more than “over the sea,” and a later report justified that disbelief because, on Nov. 24, bigstory.ap.org reported that China’s president was visiting “hospitalized victims of deadly explosions that ripped through residential and commercial roads. . . .”
So how do you feel now about Canadian pipelines that, at locations along the route and in port towns and cities, will come up close and personal with British Columbians?
Reaction was mixed in the four or five emails I received following my Nov. 13 column, What’s in a Pipeline Alters the Risk. One email from a North Vancouver retired engineer — a man I know and respect from my council-watching days — had more than a few reservations about the position I took.
From the perspective of someone who had worked on the Trans Mountain pipeline from 1956-1962, the essence of the gentleman’s argument was three-fold:
- n Whether the oil is transported as crude, diluted bitumen (dilbit) or refined, the product does not corrode a pipeline.
- n The process of “batching” the products does not pose an increased risk of explosion.
- n When properly maintained and inspected, pipelines are an acceptable and safe way to transport the oil.
The gentleman is right on all counts — except that, because our faith in governments and corporate accountability is at an all-time low, he needs us to take five crucial elements on trust:
- n professional quality materials and construction when the line is built;
- n honest and ongoing monitoring of pipeline operation;
- n strict adherence to regulatory protocols;
- n avoidance of human error; and,
- n timely reporting — including by our mainstream media — when the inevitable “incidents” occur.
So, while I agree that transporting oil by rail may well be even more dangerous, I remain convinced that human, corporate and National Energy Board efforts notwithstanding, pipelines are high-risk investments at best.
Included in a host of other protocols I know nothing about, what I have learned from fact-checking is that while oil itself does not corrode a steel pipeline, water and/or other contaminants can. For that reason alone, diligent, continuous monitoring of its constituents is essential if corrosion is to be avoided — whether the oil is transported as crude, dilbit or refined product.
As mentioned in my earlier story, in 2012 the National Energy Board put Kinder Morgan on notice that it was not satisfied with the company’s history with regard to its inspection protocols.
Furthermore, as my correspondent acknowledged, “water, usually as salt brine, is highly corrosive — at least nine times more than contaminated crude.”
He then made a crucial point about pipeline inspections — after saying that operators try to keep potentially corrosive brine from settling long enough to do its dirty work, he explained they do that “by keeping flow velocities fairly high . . . and by routinely sending ‘pigs’ through the line to scrub out collections of brine and sludge.”
Problem is, the cost-saving measure of not doing that maintenance has led to more than one serious, even fatal, incident over the past 30 or so years. Cutting costs by compromising operations and maintenance, or by third-party contractors operating on way out of date utility blueprints — as happened at the Kinder Morgan operation in Burnaby — does not count as human error. Wilful or just plain sloppy, those items fall under my heading of unacceptable, negligent, corporate handling of products that have killed far too many innocent people.
If anything positive can be said about Friday’s deadly explosions of the Sinopec pipeline in China it is this: We now know that, for whatever reason, timely and comprehensive reporting of events that are important to the way we live our lives is not a given. As far as I’m aware, more than 72 hours after AP/CP bulletins reported the event, only Global TV-BC gave it brief mention on its newscasts and Victoria’s Times Colonist gave it some early coverage.
No wonder the “fear-mongers” my correspondent objects to have the stage — they’re the only ones doing the talking.
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