Our Pipeline Safety System Is Broken
A four-mile oil slick in Southern California this week is just the latest proof.
Big Oil comes with big risks — and as oil and gas companies make major plans to extract and ship more of their polluting product around the country, those risks are only growing. The latest example of the destructive mix of industry danger and lax government oversight can be found this week on the soiled shores of Santa Barbara: A pipeline rupture has spilled as much as 105,000 gallons of oil, according to the latest estimates, and polluted more than 4 miles of coastline and marine waters.
The pipeline is owned by Plains All American, a name that should be familiar to Southern Californians. A year ago this month, the company spilled more than 10,000 gallons into the streets of Los Angeles. But Plains is hardly the only risky venture moving petroleum through highly populated and environmentally sensitive areas. Since 1995, more than 5,600 “significant” pipeline incidents have caused nearly 1,400 injuries, killed an average of 18 people each year, and cost almost $7 billion in damages in places from Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Mayflower, Arkansas.
What’s going on here? We’re fracking and mining more dirty fuel in remote places like North Dakota’s deep Bakken formation and the Canadian tar sands pits of northern Alberta. That oil and gas needs to go to refineries and be put on ships to be sold around the world, and that means transporting it long distances, often in close proximity to national treasures like the California coastline and major population centers like Los Angeles. Big Oil is putting more and more explosive and corrosive fuel in North America’s pipelines, on ships and barges, and in aging train cars.
The results are predictably bad.
Government regulators can’t — or won’t — keep up, meaning the risks to the public are growing along with this invasion of dangerous fuels. To understand what’s not working, here are some of the ways that pipeline safety in this country is broken.
Pipeline companies are terrible at detecting leaks.
It’s unclear at this point exactly how Plains All American first learned about the Santa Barbara pipeline rupture, but some initial reports say it found out when someone smelled oil off the beach and alerted authorities. That wouldn’t be surprising — it happens a lot. Pipeline companies love to crow about their leak-detection technology, but they’re misleading the public. The truth is, their systems miss 19 out of 20 spills, and 4 out of 5 spills larger than 40,000 gallons.
Federal regulators at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration are aware of this problem — they published a report in late 2012 highlighting these failures — but the agency and industry have done little to fix it.
Even after a leak is detected, it often takes a long time to shut down a pipeline.
Authorities were alerted to the spill by public reports around noon, but the pipeline wasn’t shut down until about 3 P.M., according to the Los Angeles Times. During that time, the ruptured pipe kept spewing crude into the Pacific.
Again, this happens a lot. When a pipeline owned by the Canadian energy giant Enbridge spilled nearly one million gallons of tar sands oil into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River back in 2010, it took the company 12 hours to shut the pipeline down. In fact, even after alarms alerted operators that something was wrong, it didn’t believe its own equipment and kept trying to force more oil through the pipeline. “Just call it a false alarm,” one Enbridge analyst said. Nearly three hours later, as the second shift was nearing an end, with alarms continuing to sound, one worker threw in the towel: “Whatever. We’re going home and will be off for a few days.”
Cleanup efforts are mired in the past.
With so many spills around the country, you would think oil companies would at least get better at cleaning them up. Not so. The technology and tools available to spill responders today haven’t changed for decades. Watchdogs continually point out weaknesses in marine oil spill response plans, but nothing changes.
And it’s only getting worse as pipelines ship dirtier, harder-to-manage forms of crude. Forty miles of the Kalamazoo River are still contaminated with heavy Canadian tar sands oil five years after the Enbridge spill, even after more than $1 billion has been spent on clean up.
Instead of investing in clean technologies, Big Oil wants to ship even more filthy crude all over the country, including to California.
And we’re not talking about just a little more. We’re talking about 13 times more tar sands oil shipped to ports and refineries in the Golden State, as NRDC detailed in a report last month. Oil companies would get it there using rail cars, ships and barges (25 times more than currently ply the Pacific coastline), and pipelines — including the one owned by Plains All American that just ruptured.
Historians often credit a previous Santa Barbara oil spill, back in 1969, with helping spark the modern environmental movement. This current disaster, while potentially devastating to segments of the region’s environment and economy, could do the same, helping alert Californians to the tar sands invasion headed for their communities. There’s a better way: stronger safeguards, cleaner energy, electric vehicles, increased efficiency. California is already a national leader in implementing many of those solutions. The rest of us need to help them stand up to big polluters and keep their shores and cities safe. ’Cause Big Oil sure isn’t going to do it.
