Energy regulators propose $18 million fine for explosion at Firestone home
State energy regulators on Thursday said they will seek to fine a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. $18.25 million in connection to the deadly explosion at a home in Firestone nearly three years ago that a federal probe determined was caused by natural gas leaking from a severed underground pipe.
It would be the largest enforcement penalty ever sought by the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission — more than 10 times larger than the previous top penalty assessed by the agency.
The fine would be levied on Kerr McGee, a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corp. Kerr McGee
was a subsidiary of Anadarko Petroleum, which oversaw the pipeline at the time of the explosion. Anadarko was purchased last year by Occidental.
The COGCC’s nine-member commission will make a final decision on the penalty April 6, but Occidental spokeswoman Jennifer Brice said the company won’t contest it.
The blast nearly three years ago killed Mark Martinez and Joey Irwin and left Erin Martinez, Mark’s wife and Irwin’s sister, badly burned. Mark Martinez and Irwin were replacing a hot water heater in the Weld County home’s basement at the time.
COGCC Director Jeff Robbins said “the aggravating factor of death” boosted the fine amount.
“This is the first time this aggravating factor has been applied,” Robbins said. “However, due to the violations and loss of life, COGCC believes this is appropriate. We know that it won’t ever mean that the Martinez family will have their loved ones returned, but with today’s decision we’re using every tool possible to
the COGCC to be able to avoid any more tragedies.”
Erin Martinez issued a statement on the announcement Thursday morning.
“Our lives are forever changed,” she said. “It is hard to comprehend that the only recourse is a penalty or a fine, how do you put a price on human life?
“However, legally that is all that can be done.”
Anadarko reached an undisclosed settlement agreement with the families of victims and survivors of the deadly explosion in 2018.
The company’s spokesperson said Thursday the company also has cooperated with local and federal agencies throughout the investigations.
“In that same cooperative spirit, we will continue to work with the state, listen to our stakeholders and collaborate with the communities around us,” Brice said.
Robbins said the majority of the penalty being sought will be used to “fund special projects relevant to flowline monitoring and air emissions and will help to increase public safety.”
Some of those projects include a mobile air monitoring van, optical gas imaging cameras, satellite and remote sensing technology, remote methane leak detectors, and gas detection and metering equipment.
The largest previous fine the COGCC had levied on an oil and gas company was a $1.6 million penalty assessed to Noble Energy in 2018.
The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation into the explosion, the results of which were released last fall, determined the likely cause was a natural gas leak through a pipeline that had been cut during construction of the home two years earlier.
The home was completely destroyed by the blast.
Fire investigators later found a 1-inch-diameter black plastic pipeline running from an Anadarko well near the house that had been cut when a tank battery was moved before the Oak Meadows subdivision was built. That pipeline leaked the gas from a point 6 feet from the southeast corner of the home at 6312 Twilight Ave. Investigators said they found the gas valve at the Anadarko well in the “on” position.
The report stated that a previous owner of the well, Patina Oil and Gas Corp., had recorded the flowlines — pipes that connect wells to surrounding equipment — as being properly abandoned in 1999. But state regulatory records, the report said, “showed this to be incorrect.”
Anadarko acquired the well in 2013 and two years later temporarily shut it in.
“However, the well was not plugged and no pipelines were abandoned,” according to the NTSB.
Last fall, Brice told The Denver Post that after the Firestone tragedy the company shut in and inspected more than 3,000 vertical wells in and around Weld County, permanently disconnected and used cement to plug approximately 3,600 one-inch return lines, and provided more than 750 free methane detectors to area residents.