State wide listing of known gas leaks
Tonight, Andover, North Andover, and Lawrence had to be evacuated. More than 70 properties are on fire. Many will have lost everything.
Andover is shown as having had 39 leaks known to gas companies prior to these fires. My town, Arlington, has 205! Could this happen here?
There is no profit in maintenance, and crumbling infrastructure is a real problem in Massachusetts. Sheer luck no falling concrete landed on a car or a person at the Alewife garage.
But fires that make a town, Andover look like “Armageddon” to its fire chief cannot be tolerated. Check your town on the map and report linked here. How many gas leaks does your local gas company know about, and not fix? Allegedly, independent investigators find three times as many.
I DO think this is political and I am worried about all those impacted. I am already aware of foster kids being shuffled out of foster homes in raging fire and smoke and poor folks who are not going to find themselves in a nice hotel or motel. These people will need help, and in every city and town, fixing gas leaks ought to become and to have been at the very top of the list.
I’d like to wait until we know more about caused this disaster before drawing conclusions about what comes next.
So far, it appears that this is the result of a significant over-pressure event. Nearly a hundred properties on fire essentially simultaneously across three towns. Whatever caused this would have been just as bad if every gas leak in the state were sealed.
The single point of failure is the distribution point for Columbia Gas Company. The likely causes are things like equipment failure at that facility, human error, or a malicious act.
None of this has anything to do with gas leaks.
Not investing in our infrastructure to keep taxes low is a choice. Choosing dangerous and dirty fracked natural gas over clean and renewable wind and solar power is a choice. In no way do I blame Governor Baker for this tragedy, but I do blame his policy choices for increasing rather than reducing the chances for incidents like this one to happen.
It isn’t that I disagree with any of this, it’s that I think we should wait until we know what actually happened to drive decisions about infrastructure investment.
For example, there are multiple reports that gas companies routinely apply mild overpressure to their distribution lines in order to measure overall leakage — an essential step in working to eliminate leaks. There is some chance that either human or mechanical failure doing just that created this situation.
The thread-starter specifically proposes that we demand that “fixing leaks” be a priority. In this case, it appears that “fixing leaks” may well have CAUSED the disaster.
I invite our own soon-to-be Representative Tommy Vitolo to address the question of the wisdom or foolishness of our choices regarding natural gas. I agree that renewable power is preferable to natural gas. What I’m not clear about are the tradeoffs between natural gas and heating oil (for heating) and between natural gas and coal for electricity. I am under the impression that Massachusetts has, in fact, made reasonable progress in reducing our statewide greenhouse gas footprint. It isn’t clear to me that our choices were incorrect. I think we all agree that we want to end our reliance on natural gas. I am under the impression that, in comparison to the mid 1970s, we’ve shifted our consumption from heating oil and coal to natural gas. I don’t think that this disaster demonstrates that those choices were incorrect.
Similarly, I’m under the impression that natural gas pipelines are private, rather than public, infrastructure. Everyone who has read my commentary here knows that I enthusiastically support increasing taxes on the wealthy in order to invest in infrastructure. Even if we had done that (which we have not), natural gas pipelines are not part of that infrastructure.
Some of our most valuable lessons of aircraft safety are learned from thorough investigations of airplane crashes. One of those lessons is to wait until the investigation is complete before drawing conclusions about the incident. Time and again we learn that the actual causes were completely at odds with our initial impressions.
I am uncomfortable about using this disaster to promote our political agenda, even though I fully subscribe to that agenda.
Ask and ye shall receive.
The rumors I’ve heard are over-pressurized line. I’m not a gas distribution expert, so everything in this paragraph is me repeating things I’ve heard — this is a no fact zone. My understanding is that lines are sometimes over-pressurized by a factor of 10%, 25%, maybe even 100%. I’ve heard that a line may have been over-pressurized by a factor of 30x — 3000%. The sense is that it “pushed” gas into basements by pushing through flow valves or popping joints or seals. This gas ended up in basements, and where those basements had a spark or flame, you got a fire. I spoke with a fire fighter in Arlington on Saturday. He said he was able to put three fires out by simply turning the gas off at the meter which, for those homes, was in fact located outside the building. I asked him what would have happened had this event happened in February, and his face turned white. He hadn’t thought about it yet. In February, at any given time, most basements have an open flame — the furnace. Again, this is all speculation, heresay, rumor, and unverified.
Now, I do know a thing or two about regulating utilities, and I know a thing or two about climate change and the Global Warming Solutions Act. Here’s what I’m piecing together:
1. We need to cut all emissions state-wide 80 percent by 2050 (as compared to 1990).
2. That means almost no emissions from elec, land-transportation, or building heating. Why? Airlines, agriculture, nautical, some industrial, and a few other uses are even harder to avoid fossil.
3. New gas distribution infrastructure has lifetimes well in excess of 30 years.
This means that the 48 miles of gas distribution infrastructure are going to be, at least in part, a total waste. We can’t be using it in 2050. We can’t be using a bunch of it by 2040.
Given that it won’t be used and useful for it’s lifetime, this infrastructure is not necessarily a prudent investment. When regulated utilities make investments that are imprudent, they are not entitled to recovering that investment from ratepayers.
If Columbia Gas wants to rush in now and replace 48 miles of gas distribution pipeline infrastructure immediately, that’s their prerogative. My expectation is that when Columbia Gas comes into the Commission asking for recovery of their investment, that AG Maura Healey and the DPU Commissioners will carefully consider the prudency of Columbia Gas’ recent investment and, if appropriate, tell them no. You blew it. You spent money unwisely, and the ratepayers aren’t obligated to pay you back.
@stomv: I appreciate this prompt and thorough response.
I remain very curious about how the pressure in that line somehow went from 3x to 30x.
Hey, at least you are admitting “no facts” as opposed to “alternative facts”:)
It should not be possible to for one mistake to lead 80 to 100 gas fires. It should not even be possible for one person to start those fires. It is mind boggling that a gas distribution system is designed without fail safes.
And what about all those terrorism task forces that have been instituted since 2001.? With all the money that’s been spent imagining various terror scenarios, how is it that nobody asked what would happen if the wrong person turned the wrong valve?
I completely agree that it should not be possible.
A great many people have been asking would happen if the wrong person turned the wrong valve, and I assume that the investigation into this incident is looking very aggressively at those questions (even while assuring the public that this was not an intentional act).
Reports of cyber attacks on civilian energy infrastructure have been widespread for years. Examples include a 2017 warning from Kaspersky labs, this March 2018 warning about the UK, and this 2017 attack in Saudi Arabia.
We are in a cyber war. While we are consumed by the effort to show that our flagrantly compromised President is clear and present danger to the nation, that same President is dismantling our defenses against such attacks.
It is far too early to say whether or not this disaster was or was not a result of some intentional act. It is not too early to say that such attacks are possible.
The gas distribution system includes fail-safes. It isn’t clear that those are as robust as the systems that protect nuclear facilities — this disaster may inform the question of whether or not these fail-safes should be stronger.
I remind all of us that the Concorde was the safest passenger plane in the world until one crashed — with that one event, it became the most dangerous passenger plane in the world. We don’t know how vulnerable our gas distribution system is, because we don’t know how many times it has been attacked and we don’t know how many of those attacks have failed.
It is because the stakes in this discussion are so terrifyingly high that I think it’s so crucial that we wait until the facts are known before drawing conclusions from it. I think there’s some likelihood that those facts will lead us in directions that we are collectively very reluctant to follow.
Our collective refusal to even admit that anthropogenic climate change is real (never mind actually DO something about it) suggests to me that we may be facing some very tough decisions about critical infrastructure and its vulnerability. One of the extreme weaknesses of our current political system is its patent refusal to admit hard facts and inconvenient truths.
This disaster may help clarify our thinking about such things.