Big pipeline fire northwest of Houston Saturday night. Nancy of My Garden Spot was directly affected.
Unconfirmed reports are that a bulldozer operator scraped an underground pipeline, then hauled butt. The pipeline ruptured two hours later, resulting in this:
You can see the flames silhouetting a home.
Pipelines operate just a hair shy of around a thousand PSI. The gas system in your home is less than ONE psi. Big difference in the flames here. These were intense enough to start a lot of grass and brush fires quite a distance away.
Standard operating procedure for these things is to block off both ends of the pipe and let it burn itself out. Yeah, you can snuff out that flame, but then you have raw natural gas jetting into the atmosphere looking for an ignition source to start again, often with explosive effect.
Anyway, it wasn’t a pipeline that belongs to my employer.
And I’m thinking that the operator of that dozer is in for some stout questioning, starting with “Exactly what in he** were you DOING?”
Wow – looks like a LPG fire – awfully luminous for a nat gas fire…
I wonder how long it’ll take them to see if and when the call went to 1-800-dig-tess?
And- if he knew whar those lines on the ground ment.
you could see the warm orange glow from my house. Pretty intense stuff.
Hi,
Thanks for sending people my way!
You know, I had honestly never thought about how big the pipes must be to carry all the natural gas. I think I’d pictured them as smaller somehow. Illogical, I know. Now, I just worry about the place where they converge.
Unfotunately this type of incident is NOT as uncommon as one might believe…oh, they don’t happen every day….but they do happen more often than they should…..Usually because someone didn’t make the call to find out where the pipelines are or a “line locator” didn’t do his job…..or, all too often, because the individual operating the dozer or back/track-hoe didn’t see or ignored the markers. We had one incident in Wyoming a few years ago where a trenching machine cut through a 16″ pipeline pressurized to 1,400psig…….the ironic part is he worked for the same company that had laid that pipe line for us a year earlier!! When he hit the line witnesses said he jumped off the trencher and set new world records for the mile run. AFTER dealing with the “leak” we had to re-purge a 36 mile section of pipe before we could resume pumping gas through it……that means no gas was delivered from that field for about 26 hrs and we were producing right at 56mmscfd from that field.