PRESSURE POINTS
Columbia Gas faces yet another settlement for too much pressure on its pipelines
Columbia Gas of Pennsylvania, the Canonsburg-based utility that serves about 440,000 customers in Pennsylvania, has had a string of incidents in recent years where gas pressure built up in pipelines to dangerous levels.
The most dramatic was the 2019 explosion of a home in North Franklin, Washington County.
Columbia Gas was doing work in the area on July 31 of that year, raising the pressure on a main line that had previously been part of a low-pressure system. To prevent the higher pressure from blowing out appliances in people’s homes, the utility installed regulators that would step down the gas pressure before it got to customers’ meters.
Except the company missed one house that was set further back from the main, on a side street.
The increased pressure — more than 100 times the original level — overwhelmed the home at 100 Lake Drive. The line leaked for hours before the homeowner arrived, smelled the gas and went outside to call for help.
Several first responders arrived. Shortly after one of them turned off the gas supply to the house, the structure was obliterated in a blast that injured three people, damaged cars and other homes including one that was later condemned.
The day after the explosion, Columbia’s president at the time, Mike Huwar, publicly apologized.
“Our customers deserve safe and reliable delivery of natural gas to their homes,” Mr. Huwar, who is now the CEO of North Shore-based Peoples Natural Gas, said in August 2019. “We failed to deliver on our mission in this instance, and we are deeply sorry.”
Under pressure
Utilities of all stripes have ramped up infrastructure replacement campaigns to ensure reliability. Those that deal with pipelines are racing against the deterioration of metal that has been in the ground for decades. Aging pipelines can become corroded and leak gas, which is both a safety hazard and an environmental concern as methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
Natural gas utilities such as Columbia and Peoples, in this part of the state, replace hundreds of miles of
distribution mains and service lines, which carry gas from the main to a customer’s property.
Utilities are also uprating low-pressure lines to intermediate pressure. Columbia has said its goal is to eliminate low-pressure systems as quickly as possible, as higher pressure and twoway gas flow is more efficient. This involves outfitting each impacted customer with their own regulator.
In North Franklin, the cause of the explosion was clear right away — the house that exploded wasn’t included within the buffer that utility workers used to equip impacted clients with regulators, so it didn’t have one.
But it took nearly three years for investigators at the state Public Utility Commission to come to a settlement with the utility that includes a $990,000 civil penalty.
PUC commissioners voted last week to put the settlement out for public comment before they decide whether it should be approved.
Last month, they had rejected another proposed settlement with Columbia Gas, also stemming from over- pressurization of pipelines.
In the Rimbersburg system in Clarion County, pressure built up for nearly a month in 2018 when a valve, surrounded by old and hardened grease, could not be properly sealed.
Another valve, which wasn’t closed properly, caused a series of over-pressurization events on the Fayetteville system in Franklin County. There, Columbia Gas received 62 calls about gas odors, a third of which were deemed “hazardous leaks requiring immediate repair.” In total, Columbia found 193 leaks on that system, which PUC investigators said was compromised by pressure that was too high and had to be completely replaced.
But what was damaged and replaced, and who is responsible for the cost of that work — Columbia’s corporate wallet or customer rates — is a question that PUC commissioners said requires more explanation. They asked PUC staff and Columbia to submit further details.
The rejected settlement in the case of Clarion and Franklin counties carried a proposed penalty of $535,000, which the document said was high enough to reflect that over-pressurization is a known issue for Columbia.
In 2014, it had negotiated another settlement, with a penalty of $200,000, for allegations that involved over-pressurized pipelines.
Columbia Gas, which is owned by Indiana-based NiSource Inc., gained notoriety for a catastrophic overpressurization event in Massachusetts when, in September 2018, a cascade of explosions in the Boston suburbs killed one person, injured 23 others and damaged 131 buildings. Three homes were completely destroyed.
The U.S. Department of Justice ordered Columbia Gas of Massachusetts to pay a $53 million criminal fine over the incident and required NiSource to sell its subsidiary in the state, forcing it out of the business there.
Corrective measures
The two over-pressurization settlements now in flux in Pennsylvania include a number of changes that Columbia Gas had agreed to make to prevent future incidents.
The latest settlement requires Columbia Gas to come up with a way to identify the location and pressure of each service line in its territory, to verify the locations of all structures within at least 500 feet from the main whose pressure is to be increased, and to train its workers on these-procedures.
In the agreement stemming from Columbia’s issues in Clarion and Franklin counties, the company said it would install remote pressure monitors as an alert system, and continue the installation of “slam shut” regulators on low-pressure systems, which shut off the flow of gas when pressure suddenly rises.
Already, every time Columbia Gas replaces a gas main, it also installs an excess flow valve before the gas reaches a customer’s meter. These devices shut off the flow to the customer if they sense a large change in pressure. Such changes usually mean there is a big gas leak or damage to a pipeline from excavation.
“Over time,” the utility wrote in its rate case documents, “this results in a system where service (lines) are much less vulnerable to safety risks from third-party damage.”
Columbia’s cost to replace and uprate pipelines is factored into customers rates. In its latest rate case, filed in March, where Columbia asked for rate hikes of around 10% for the average residential customer, the company said it needs the extra revenue to fund its accelerated infrastructure program.
The utility is also advocating for home natural gas detectors. These devices, like smoke alarms, are battery operated and sound an alarm and a warning for people to leave and call 911 when concentrations of natural gas rise to a certain level.
“This technology is especially timely since the odorant used in natural gas may be less effective for customers potentially suffering a persistent loss of smell due to COVID,” Columbia Gas wrote in its rate case.