Pipeline peril
Explosions reveal dangers hiding in old pipes
The cast iron natural gas main that served Dr. Richard Williams’ turn-of-the-century home in this Southern college town was as old as the house itself: It was built during Shreveport’s first gas-fueled boom in 1911. ❚ When that pipeline cracked in 2016, the gas built up slowly and silently in a shed behind Williams’ home. All it took was an ignition source – a lit cigar – to spark the gaseous fireball that would take his life.
The 65-year-old psychiatrist was one of at least 264 people killed in natural gas leaks, fires and explosions since 1990, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data shows. More than 1,600 people have been injured.
The natural gas industry and its government regulators have known of the dangers of leaking gas pipelines for decades. After a fatal gas explosion in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1990, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended utilities replace their cast iron pipes “in a planned, timely manner.”
Twenty-eight years later, the utilities still haven’t finished the job.
The work is expensive, often difficult, and sometimes perilous. Gas crews upgrading cast iron pipe in Massachusetts in September inadvertently ignited fires and explosions that destroyed 131 buildings, killing one person, injuring 21 and leaving hundreds homeless.
“I wasn’t that concerned, because I felt like if it was a big major safety issue that the gas company would have taken care of it.”
Jimmy Harris, neighbor of Richard Williams, who died after a gas leak
That disaster – and hundreds of others across the country – illuminates the conflicting pressures on the industry as it tries to balance safety with consumer demands for cheap, convenient energy.
State utility commissions are under pressure from consumer groups to keep energy rates down. Grassroots groups oppose new pipelines in their neighborhoods. And often there aren’t enough qualified pipeline workers to do the work safely.
Utilities replacing leaking gas pipes receive only spotty oversight from a fractured system of state and federal safety regulations. Government regulators have largely left it to the utilities to determine for themselves what their biggest safety vulnerabilities are.
Decades of neglect
Underneath our feet and below our streets sit more than 2.2 million miles of pipelines that carry natural gas into our homes and businesses. They deliver a relatively cheap and clean-burning fuel that cooks our meals, heats our showers and keeps us warm.
But much of that infrastructure is old, outdated, obsolete or damaged. When the pipes leak or rupture, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts had just started work on its plan to replace cast iron gas mains in the Merrimack Valley of Northeastern Massachusetts when an alarm went off at its control center in Columbus, Ohio, on Sept. 13. Pressure in the system was spiking. Within minutes, homes across the cities of Lawrence, Andover and North Andover began to explode.
Federal investigators say a work crew was given faulty orders. They were directed to remove an old pipe but not a feedback line that alerted the system to a drop in pressure. When the old cast iron main was taken out of service, the system detected the loss in pressure and compensated by pumping more gas. Pressure swelled to 12 times the limit for which the system was built.
Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said the episode raises serious questions about whether existing federal regulations are enough to protect the public.
“The natural gas industry needs to learn their safety lessons so this doesn’t happen again,” Markey says. “If they don’t, this will be repeated.”
The natural gas industry says that’s already happening.
“I know a game-changing incident when I see it,” says former pipeline safety official Christina Sames, now vice president of the American Gas Association. “And this was, in my opinion, a game-changing incident.”
The Massachusetts explosions could become the most expensive natural gas disaster ever, for a local utility that was already spending $80 million this year to upgrade an aging infrastructure.
But all across the country, smaller, less spectacular natural gas incidents have been just as lethal.
❚ DETROIT: Neighbors say they complained of a gas odor for days before a house on Trenton Street exploded in 2015.
Eugene Trump Jr., 19, was in the basement of his father’s house with his girlfriend, who liked to smoke a hookah. A lighter sparked a blast that blew out the basement windows and ignited Trump’s clothes.
“I went outside and his dad was holding him in his lap with a blanket around him,” says Nicole Elliott, who lived next door. “His face was burned. His clothes were burned into his skin. His dad was burned from putting out the flames. It was gruesome.”
Trump died from his injuries. Crews traced the leak to a cracked 6-inch cast iron gas main installed in 1923. Trump’s father reached a confidential out-ofcourt settlement with DTE Energy. A spokeswoman for the utility said it has no record of odor complaints before the explosion. ❚ MINNEAPOLIS: At the Christian Minnehaha Academy last year, utility crews were moving the gas meter from the basement of one building to the outside, where it could be more easily read. As part of the work, they inadvertently disconnected an active natural gas line. Worried about a possible explosion, they fled the area.
The school exploded. It was early August, and school was not in session, but two staff members were killed and seven people were injured. Centerpoint Energy settled a lawsuit with the family of receptionist Ruth Berg, one of the victims.
MILLERSVILLE, PENNSYLVANIA:
A woman out for a walk on a cul-de-sac of newer homes in Pennsylvania Dutch country last year smelled gas and called the local utility. A crew evacuated a homeowner and was searching for the leak when the house exploded, killing one worker.
The NTSB blamed an incorrectly installed mechanical joint used to tap the service line into the gas main when the subdivision was constructed in 1998.
Similar tapping tees were responsible for explosions in nearby West Lampeter Township, Pennsylvania, and in Knoxville, Tennessee, the agency said in a safety report in June.
The Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission hit UGI Utilities this month with a $2 million fine for the Millersville explosion.
Natural gas explosions reported to the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) since 1990 have cost at least $1.2 billion. That includes only incidents in gas distribution systems – the mains and service lines that carry gas to customers – not the larger transmission pipelines that carry gas from state to state, or leaks inside homes and businesses.
The incidents have a range of causes. Often, natural gas can fuel an existing fire, making it more explosive, destructive and lethal.
One common factor: Old infrastructure. Decades of freezing and thawing, corrosion, vibration and shifting soil can eat away at the cast iron and untreated steel pipes that were once state of the art in natural gas distribution.
Nationally, more than 53,000 miles of natural gas mains were built before 1940. Those tired systems feed fuel to millions of homes and businesses, many of them in and around the older industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest – New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit – and places where the energy industry first boomed: Houston and Dallas.
More damage can be caused by contractors working on gas pipes or other utilities, or homeowners digging in their yards without calling the utilities first.
Pipes that are installed incorrectly can sit silently for years underground before becoming a problem. Leaking gas quietly builds up to just the right concentration – somewhere between 5 per- cent and 15 percent – before a spark or flame detonates the explosive mixture.
Progress toward upgrading the infrastructure has been slow.
In 2011, then-Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood called on the industry to speed up its replacement of aging cast iron pipes and asked Congress to add inspectors and increase penalties for violations.
A USA TODAY investigation in 2014 found more than 85,000 miles of aging cast iron and bare-steel gas pipes still in use, despite decades of government warnings. By the end of 2017, that number was 71,000.
Columbia Gas of Massachusetts replaced 42 percent of its cast iron lines in the past decade but still had 471 miles of the old pipes at the end of last year.
In a state regulatory filing in 2017 – the year before the explosions – the utility specifically cited the difficulty in replacing pipes in older, industrial cities such as Lawrence.
“In these areas, it is unlikely that the company will be able to plan and undertake a large number of infrastructure replacement projects,” Columbia Gas said. “The mains and services are typically located in densely populated urban and business districts with roadways that are paved from building to building and are heavily congested with other underground utilities and structures, making installation of new main problematic.”
Replacing old mains has its own dangers. The National Transportation Safety Board says the Massachusetts fires were caused by an error when Columbia Gas took an old line out of service.
Investigators say the utility failed to tell a work crew to disconnect a pressure-sensing system in the old line.
When the line went out of service, the sensors detected the drop in pressure. The system compensated by increasing the flow of gas. Pressure built to more than a dozen times the level the system was built for, causing explosions and fires across three cities.
Mark McDonald says the catastrophe was waiting to happen. He’s president of Nat Gas Consulting and an expert witness in lawsuits over gas explosions.
“We didn’t take care of this problem for decades and decades and decades,” he said. “Now there’s a rush to replace this infrastructure – obviously with the intent to improve the safety of the system. But not having the right safeguards and quality workers could cause more explosion hazards such as this.”
‘My husband’s on fire!’
Dr. Richard Warren Williams lived on one of the most picturesque thoroughfares in Shreveport. But the stench of natural gas in the neighborhood was so strong that you could smell it driving down the street.
Next-door neighbor Jimmy Harris operates a bed and breakfast out of his 1905 Queen Anne home.
“I wasn’t that concerned, because I felt like if it was a big major safety issue that the gas company would have taken care of it,” he says. “It was a common occurrence every day, and it’s just like we got numb to it.”
So it’s not entirely clear what Williams was thinking – or smelling – on that late-July Sunday in 2016 when he lit a cigar and walked into his backyard.
Williams had smelled natural gas in his yard before. In May 2016 – less than
three months before the explosion that would take his life – he called Centerpoint Energy to report the odor of sulfur in the alley behind his house.
“There were gas leaks everywhere,” Harris says. Once, he says, a guest threatened to check out because she thought the smell was sewer gas.
Crews fixed the service line that connected the gas main to the meter behind Williams’ house. But they left a hole in the ground, covered with plywood, rocks and caution tape.
It remained that way for weeks. It’s unclear when the gas main started to leak, but Centerpoint’s own federal incident report to PHMSA blamed “improper backfill” of the hole.
Williams went outside at about 4 p.m. on July 31, 2016. As Williams’ wife went back into their house to grab a bottle of wine, his cigar ignited a fireball.
Michelle Williams heard the explosion and called 911.
“My husband’s on fire!” she shouted. “Something just blew up!” “What’s on fire?” the operator asked. “My husband! He’s rolling in the grass! Something blew up!” “What was he working on?”
“It was leaky gas! ... Please, he’s rolling on the ground! ... Now he’s getting in the pool! Something blew up!”
She hung up to run outside with towels to extinguish the flames.
By the time Williams made it to his backyard swimming pool, he had suffered burns over 63 percent of his body.
Still, he was conscious when help arrived. He told a firefighter that he had turned a corner and “it exploded.”
Firefighters called the gas company. Workers found a gas main leak so large that it was visibly blowing dirt up through cracks in the pavement.
Harris and at least nine others told investigators they had frequently smelled natural gas, beginning a year before and peaking in the days before the explosion. One neighbor said she smelled a “weird smell” but couldn’t tell what it was. Others said they couldn’t pinpoint the source of the leak.
Pure natural gas is colorless and odorless. Some gas naturally contains a small amount of mercaptan, the chemical that gives gas its distinctive rotten egg smell. Utilities are required to add more mercaptan so people can tell when it’s leaking.
Williams was taken to the intensive care burn unit at University Health Shreveport, where he underwent at least 63 medical procedures, his family says in a lawsuit against Centerpoint and the City of Shreveport.
Williams eventually fell into a coma. Eighty-one days after the explosion, he died. He was never able to give a full account of what happened.
His brother, John Williams, is a partner in a Shreveport law firm that specializes in oil and gas law and litigation. The firm is representing the Williams family in the lawsuit.
The lawyers say Centerpoint and the city were negligent in maintaining the gas pipes. They argued in a court filing last month that the utility should pay punitive damages.
“Centerpoint attempts to frame Dr. Williams’ death as some sort of onetime freak occurrence,” they wrote. “However, the evidence is overwhelming that Dr. Williams’ death was the direct result of a systemic failure on the part of Centerpoint caused by conscious decisions made by Centerpoint’s officers and executives in Texas.”
“The systemic failure at issue,” they wrote, “is Centerpoint’s choice not to remove dangerous cast iron pipes from its system, even though Centerpoint knew just how deadly they were.”
Centerpoint’s lawyer, Bruce Parkerson, told USA TODAY in a statement that Centerpoint “accepts its responsibility in operating a safe and reliable system.” But in reports and court papers, the company says Williams himself is partly to blame. It also blames the city of Shreveport, which maintains the alley behind Williams’ house.
Shreveport City Attorney William Bradford says he doesn’t comment on pending litigation, but “we do think it’s a defensible claim on behalf of the city.”
The Williams’ case illustrates a challenge posed by overlapping state and federal regulations.
Pipeline regulations are enforced by the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources through an agreement with the federal government.
That agency cited Centerpoint last year for four violations, including failing to keep operation and emergency plans up to date and conduct inspections.
The maximum penalty was $10,000 a day for each citation. The state offered to settle for a one-time fine of $2,500 if
“If you were to create a system from scratch today, I don’t
think you would create it the way it currently exists.”
Cynthia Quarterman, pipeline safety official in the Obama administration
Centerpoint fixed the problems – which both sides say the utility did.
The state has not cited Centerpoint for violations in the Williams case.
The Louisiana State Police filed criminal charges against Centerpoint for failing to report the gas leak to the state, but those charges were dismissed.
A broken oversight system
President Lyndon Johnson had already been prodding Congress to pass pipeline safety legislation when a natural gas fire ignited gunpowder at a gun store in Richmond, Indiana, killing 41 people in 1968.
That year, Johnson signed the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, which set up a federal-state partnership: The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, a new agency in the U.S. Department of Transportation, would establish national standards for gas utilities, but state regulators would be responsible for enforcing those regulations.
The compromise continues to this day. Cynthia Quarterman served five years as the top pipeline safety official in the Obama administration, the longest tenure in the agency’s history.
“Let me put it this way: If you were to create a system from scratch today, I don’t think you would create it the way it currently exists,” she says.
“The PHMSA is not big enough to cover all those local and state programs,” Quarterman says. “There just aren’t enough bodies to do it.”
The current federal pipeline safety administrator, Howard “Skip” Elliott, declined to be interviewed.
The federal government awards grants for pipeline safety programs to regulators in the 48 states that participate, funding on average 68 percent of such programs. (Alaska and Hawaii do not conduct natural gas utility inspections. They leave pipeline safety to federal inspectors.)
“It’s definitely undersupervised,” said McDonald, the Boston-based consultant. He was a leak inspector for the Boston Gas Co. for 25 years. He now is an expert witness in lawsuits over natural gas explosions.
“I’ve never seen a PHMSA investigator in my entire career,” he says. “I’ve never seen a surprise visit from any regulator – federal or state – in my entire career. So that’s a problem.”
The agency required every utility to develop a plan to replace old pipelines and make other safety improvements beginning in 2010.
But the agency doesn’t inspect those documents, known as distribution integrity management plans, or DIMPs, and state oversight varies.
In many states, utilities don’t have to submit the plans for approval. In others, state officials refused requests by the USA TODAY Network for copies.
The Missouri Public Service Commission voted 4-0 in September to deny a request to release the plans for Spire Energy, after the company cited “system safety and security” concerns.
In Louisiana, as in many states, regulators look at the plans but do not keep copies. That protects the documents from disclosure under freedom of information laws, allowing utilities to keep their contents a closely guarded secret.
The result, critics say, is a broken oversight system with little transparency and no one clearly in charge.
Markey, who sits on the Senate committee that oversees gas pipeline regulations, says that needs to change.
“What industries attempt to accomplish is to create a regulatory black hole where neither federal nor state regulators have clear supervisory responsibility. And that is in large part what his happening here,” he says. “Going forward ... we just can’t let pipeline companies regulate themselves.”
New Jersey has more than 70,000 miles of gas pipelines – nearly double the length of all public roads in the state. Its largest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, has more cast iron pipeline than any utility in the country.
PSE&G said it stopped using the leakprone cast iron pipes in the 1960s and has replaced about 42 percent of them since then, reducing the number of leaks to about 8,000 a year – less than one leak for every 4 miles of pipeline.
Lynda Farrell says that’s not good enough. She heads the Pipeline Safety Coalition, an advocacy group based in suburban Philadelphia.
“Nationally we’re in pretty damned bad shape, not only when it comes to the consistency of regulations but also in having the needed powers to regulate. The reason for the absence of that regulation is simply that the industry has always written the safety regulations.”
Industry officials say the best way to upgrade systems is to give local utilities the flexibility to address their own unique problems.
When President Donald Trump signed an executive order last year inviting industry groups to propose regulations to be eliminated, the natural gas industry asked that inspection schedules be governed not by federal regulations but by the industry’s own risk-based rankings of their highest priorities.
Nisource, the parent company of Columbia Gas, said the government often issues “well intentioned” regulations that might resolve lower-risk safety issues but divert resources away from replacing what it sees as its highest priority: replacing cast iron pipe.
“Each operating system is unique,” Nisource lawyers Kimberly Cuccia and Joseph Clark wrote to the Department of Transportation. “Operators must have the flexibility to focus their resources on their highest risks, which ultimately ensures the best value in terms of cost and safety for all customers and the general public.”
An isolated incident?
Elizabeth Rueve-Miller is the cofounder of NOPE, or Neighbors Opposing Pipeline Extension. The group is protesting plans for a new high-pressure distribution pipeline through Cincinnati and its suburbs.
She was waiting for her turn to speak at a suburban city council meeting in September when a flurry of text messages alerted her to the Massachusetts explosions.
“A failure involving something like that would be devastating,” Rueve-Miller says. “I’m not against natural gas. I’m against irresponsible infrastructure. We’re concerned about people’s safety.”
It’s a classic not-in-my-backyard debate.
Duke Energy says it needs the new pipeline to keep up with growing demand for energy, and to replace smaller lines built in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
But the preferred routes for the line run through as many as a dozen communities and neighborhoods.
“We looked at literally thousands upon thousands of options,” Duke spokeswoman Sally Thelen says. “We are very confident in our safety record.”
Harris, the Shreveport bed-andbreakfast owner, said he just has to trust his gas company to operate a safe system.
“I know gas is dangerous, but I just don’t look at it as our responsibility to fix it,” he said. “I still in my mind assume that basically the companies are looking out for our safeties and to me that was an isolated incident. “I guess I should be more diligent about things like that.”
Gregory Korte reported from McLean, Va. Nick Wooten reported from Shreveport. Contributing: John Wisely in Detroit, James Nash in Trenton, N.J, Dan Horn in Cincinnati, Thomas Zambito in Westchester, N.Y., and John Kelly in Melbourne, Fla.