Gas line damage from digging frequent, but punishment rare
Nearly four times a day in Colorado, developers, homeowners or builders hit gas pipelines while excavating or digging into the ground, sometimes with deadly consequences such as the fatal explosion in Firestone that was caused by a severed line near a home.
But Colorado officials have an inadequate system for preventing pipeline excavation damages, which are responsible for about a third of the state’s gas pipeline leaks, federal regulators have warned. Deaths in the state from excavation damage range from a contractor who was preparing a lot for construction to a person who hit a gas gathering line while digging a fence.
Records show that in 2015, nearly 1,300 gas pipelines in Colorado were damaged during excavation. The state that year issued no civil penalties or sanctions for any pipeline excavation violations, officials with the U.S. Department of Transportation noted in a September 2016 letter to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, a copy of which also was sent to Gov. John Hickenlooper.
The lack of state penalties prompted federal officials to find Colorado’s enforcement of its excavation damage prevention laws inadequate last year. Colorado is one of 26 states to receive such a rating from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
“PHMSA encourages Colorado damage prevention stakeholders to work with policy makers to pass legislation that addresses the inadequacies in the state’s excavation damage prevention program,” states the letter sent to Colorado officials.
Colorado still hasn’t addressed the concerns of federal regulators, said Tom
Finch, a local contact on pipeline safety issues for the U.S. Department of Transportation. “They still have not gotten anything through the legislature,” Finch said Friday. “We told them they have to get an enforcement mechanism in place, but we don’t tell them how to do it.”
Colorado has yet to come up with a way to punish violators, said J.D. Maniscalco, chief executive of the 811 call program in Colorado, a nonprofit industry consortium that is the primary defense for preventing excavation damage to pipelines and other underground infrastructure in the state. While the program provides annual data reports for federal and state officials, no regulatory agency reviews specific damage reports it collects for further investigation.
“We provide annual damage data, but the fact of the matter is the inadequacy comes from not having a state authority looking at detailed damage reports comprehensively,” Maniscalco said.
“The one thing we find when damage occurs is that something was dropped,” Maniscalco said. “There was a failure in communication. Communication seems to always be the issue when we look at damages.”
State law requires owners of underground piping and other infrastructure to give Maniscalco’s group details for mapping. State law also requires builders, developers and other excavators — including homeowners doing work beyond routine maintenance on existing planted landscapes — to call 811 before they dig.
Those calls trigger an alert from the call system to owners of underground pipelines. Upon notification, the pipeline owners have two days to identify for the excavator any underground infrastructure.
“Every damage and every incident with gas concerns us because therein lies the potential for someone to lose their life or to be harmed,” Maniscalco said. “There needs to be statewide enforcement, looking and holding accountable every stakeholder — facility owners and excavators. I feel that everyone should be held accountable for their role in damage prevention.”
There are gaps in what the 811 system tracks. For example, ranchers and farmers are exempted from the state’s excavation laws and don’t have to call before digging for agricultural purposes. And gas piping abandoned prior to 2001 is not tracked by the system.
Substantial progress has been made in reducing pipeline excavation damage in Colorado, Maniscalco said. In 2003, nearly 4,500 gas pipelines were damaged by excavation, more than three times the number from last year.
State law requires excavators to alert the 811 system and pipeline owners anytime they damage a pipeline. After such notification, owners of the damaged pipes have 90 days to report further findings to the 811 system, including whether they were notified of plans to excavate. In about 30 percent of the cases of damaged lines, the excavator did not call first and was digging blindly, records show.
Damages that occur with no prior notification of excavation can result in civil penalties of $5,000 for the first offense and up to $25,000 for each subsequent offense within a year, according to state law. If three such offenses occur, the next offense is a penalty of up to $75,000 per occurrence.
State law leaves it up to owners of pipelines to seek civil penalties through lawsuits. The Colorado Public Utilities Commission audits pipeline owners on whether they are “identifying the parties damaging their pipelines and exercising the appropriate authority,” and generally they are, said Terry Bote, a spokesman for the PUC, in an email. For the PUC to issue penalties for excavation pipeline damage, state law would have to change, he said.
Other issues besides lack of notifications can occur. Excavators report that nearly 15 percent of the damages are because of incorrect information on the location of piping. About 16 percent of the damages occur even when piping is properly marked, according to damage reports submitted by excavators.
In the wake of the explosion in Firestone, legislators and Hickenlooper have pushed for better public access to mapping of gas pipelines in the state. The Republican-controlled state Senate killed legislation that would have required the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, to compile detailed pipeline maps and make the information available to the public. That proposal generated opposition from industry lobbyists and trade groups. The pipeline maps in the 811 system aren’t available to the public. Nor are the 811 damage reports or excavation notifications.
The pipeline damage data covers a wide range of underground piping and infrastructure. The system’s annual reports don’t identify whether the damaged gas pipelines are for production or for commercial distribution and transmission lines. Damage often occurs in areas with heavy gas production where development also is surging, but not always, the reports show. Weld County logged 94 excavation gas pipe damages in 2015. Jefferson County logged 100. Boulder County had 73 and Adams County 99. Denver, with 247, had the most of any county in the state.
The April 17 explosion in Firestone was caused by a cut flowline attached to an active Anadarko Petroleum well about 170 feet from the home, investigators have said. How the flowline was cut has not been revealed, but the house was built in January 2015 by Century Communities.
The flowline blamed for the explosion was buried 7 feet down and was severed 6 feet from the southeast corner of the destroyed home’s foundation. A volatile mix of odorless methane and propane flowed from the pipe and saturated the nearby soil. The pipeline once was connected to a nearby tank, which was moved before the Oak Meadows subdivision was built. The pipeline should have been capped at the well but instead was left connected to the well, investigators have said.
Gas seeped into the home through French drains and a sump pump and ignited. Killed were Mark Martinez and Joey Irwin, who were replacing the home’s hot water heater. Erin Martinez was left traumatically burned. Maniscalco declined to publicly share his program’s damage reports or excavation alerts in connection with the Firestone explosion.
It’s not the first fatal tragedy linked to pipeline excavation damage in Colorado.
In 2002, a gas gathering pipeline in Colorado exploded when a man operating a backhoe hit the pipeline while building a new fence. The man died. That same year a contractor was killed when he hit a gas distribution line with a backhoe. A Colorado farmer was killed when he hit a gas line that same year.
A Pueblo restaurant exploded in 2009, killing one woman. Xcel Energy claimed the restaurant explosion happened after Pueblo city workers worked near a gas pipeline owned by the utility, raising concerns they may have hit the pipe and caused a gas leak. Investigators said a compression fitting on the pipeline had separated because of tension, a situation they said likely developed over time as opposed to a single incident.