Geyser threat compels Kinder Morgan to re-route pipeline
NILAND — The media darling mud-pot geyser that’s been getting so much national attention of late has spurred yet another company affected by its movement into action.
Kinder Morgan Inc. will be moving its pipeline away from the socalled Niland geyser in January in a construction project that will cost the fuel conveyance company some $3 million.
“This will take it out of any future path,” said Allen Fore, Kinder Morgan’s vice president of public affairs, who was in the Valley this week to survey the area and see the geyser for himself.
Already the Union Pacific Railroad has built two “shoo-fly lines,” or rail spurs, in the area about five miles northwest of Niland to take rail traffic away from the geyser. The spurs were built to the immediate west of the lines, which travels a northwest to southeast direction through Imperial County, from Riverside County to the Arizona line.
Highway 111 is also in the path of the geyser, but California Department of Transportation officials said Friday morning they have no plans to re-route 111 as of now.
“At this point, we’re just in a wait-andsee period,” Caltrans spokesman Ed Joyce said. “There is nothing Caltrans is doing proactively.”
Joyce did say there are contingencies in place in the event the geyser advances toward the highway, and those include rerouting traffic to Highway 86 at the north and south of the Salton Sea area, yet allowing access to residents off Highway 111.
Meanwhile, Kinder Morgan officials are in the process of fast-tracking the local, state and federal permitting associated with the movement of its Santa Fe Pacific Pipeline, which delivers gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel to an Imperial facility. The pipeline runs almost the length of California, extending 515 miles as it connects to Imperial, some 864 miles north and 135 miles toward San Diego.
Renderings of where exactly the pipeline will be rerouted were not immediately available, but Fore said it will head immediately east and then take a sharp turn southwest, all across private property in the area.
“For us, this a relatively routine construction project,” Fore said.
The pipeline is buried about 3 feet underground and poses no danger to the public even in the event that the geyser would undermine the ground beneath it. Fore said the line would simply span any resulting chasm if one were created by the geyser. Then, Kinder Morgan would come in and shore that line until it could be moved.
On Nov. 6, Imperial County Fire Chief Alfredo Estrada went before the county Board of Supervisors to extend the state of emergency declaration on the geyser as a procedural measure that ensures the county would be eligible for emergency funding if need be.
The geyser appears to have stopped its advance in recent weeks, though.
“Historically, it didn’t move for decades,” Estrada said Friday. “It’s been paused for a month, a month and a half.”
Initially, Union Pacific efforts to stem the advance of the geyser appeared to work. But then, in a matter of days, the geyser moved about 60 feet and crept beneath a steel berm inserted by the rail company and abutted the permanent railroad tracks in the area.
Estrada said since Union Pacific has been pumping water out of the geyser 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it has stayed in place.
Recently, the geyser has become a celebrity of sorts, having been written up in the Los Angeles Times, National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institute publication, even the New York Post, the Weather Channel and Newsweek.
Headlines like “Creeping mud geyser cuts a destructive path through California” or “A bubbling pool of mud is on the move, and no one knows why” have raised eyebrows and interest across the country as the primordial ooze has made for great photos and video.
Seismologists with the U.S. Geological Survey and Caltech have been quoted ad naseum to see if the march of the geyser could be related to “the big one” — a high-magnitude earthquake — on the San Andreas Fault, which runs southeasterly-northwesterly direction beneath the Salton Sea. The answer, by the way, has been no, it’s not a precursor to the big one.