Read Energy Transfer’s latest quarterly report and you’ll find this description of the explosion of its one-week old Revolution pipeline. “On September 10, 2018, a pipeline release and fire (the ‘Incident’) occurred on the Revolution pipeline, a natural gas gathering line, in the vicinity of Ivy Lane located in Center Township, Beaver County, Pennsylvania. There were no injuries, but there were evacuations of local residents as a precautionary measure.”
Neighbors of the Rosati family whose home was destroyed in the blast met with Auditor General Eugene De Pasquale in April to describe what happened that day and the lingering effects the explosion has had on the community.
“The Rosatis ran out the door with only the clothes on their backs. The woman wanted to go back for a dog. The man said RUN. As they made their way up their driveway, they looked back and flames were on their roof. They lost everything,” they said in a statement they read to the Auditor General.
“911 had to be convinced that a pipeline exploded; emergency personnel did not know it was operational. Neighbors helped neighbors as we evacuated. One made rope leashes for the Rosati dogs. Another gave them a vehicle. Words were few. Terror was in our eyes and on everyone’s face. An ambulance evacuated an at-home hospice patient. A young couple, on their way to give birth to their third child, heard about the explosion. They had to decide – return home to help with the other two children or have faith in emergency responders.”
In the aftermath, their quiet cul-de-sac became a tourist attraction, according to their statement. Repairs to 11 high tension towers damaged or destroyed in the explosion resulted in “the roar of construction equipment, constant utility traffic, and helicopters overhead doing repairs that became unbearable.”
The catastrophic failure of the pipeline was attributed to the shifting of earth that followed flooding from intense storms that pounded the region.
In their April statement, the neighbors reported, “Traffic keeps coming, and reclamation equipment works to control erosion, springs and landslides. DEP inspection reports list violation after violation. DEP report 2835037 – ‘The area does not appear capable of resisting erosion.’” The last line is a reference to a Department of Environmental Protection Inspection Report from January 24th that cited 12 Environmental Health & Safety violations. Another report from the same day contained 7 more. According to a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the quote actually appeared in an inspection report from February 12th that cited 10 Environmental Health & Safety violations and one Administrative violation. It’s an understandable error. The DEP’s website lists 97 inspections since the explosion, each citing multiple violations.
The Post-Gazette story opens with Susan Michael, daughter of the hospice patient evacuated last September, whose property is closest to another pipeline planned for the same area. In fact, it will cross the Revolution pipeline just hundreds of feet from the site of the rupture, on the same slope that is classified as a ‘High Erosion Hazard’. Ms. Michael says, “I’m surrounded.”
According to the statement to the Auditor General, one of the neighbors has “talked to the PUC, DEP, and local officials and they were surprised about this crossing.” She asks, “Where is the oversight?” In this case, it’s with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, mostly. The new pipeline from National Fuel Gas Supply Corp., called Line N, is a 12” line being constructed to move gas to a natural gas power plant at Royal Dutch Shell’s controversial ethane cracker plant planned for Potter Township, about 5 miles west of the blast site. The crossing shouldn’t come as a surprise to the DEP, however. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approves natural gas transmission pipeline projects, but not without water quality permits issued by the state. Here’s the notice of the agency’s intention to issue the requisite water quality permit published in June of 2018. Here’s the notice of its decision to issue the permit in January of this year, four months after the Revolution exploded.
Center Township engineer Ned Mitrovich told the Post-Gazette Energy Transfer will likely reroute the Revolution to the property where the Rosati family once lived. The company purchased the property and a neighboring property after the disaster. The two pipelines will still cross. Now they’ll cross on land owned by Energy Transfer.
This is what it’s like living in a state overrun by shale gas development. Energy Transfer’s soulless description of what happened last September appears within the pages of the Litigation and Contingencies section of its quarterly report where you can also read about problems on the Mariner East 2, Rover, and Bayou Bridge pipelines in addition to 5 cases of water contamination from the chemical MTBE and other offenses. There are no good actors in the pipeline business. Energy Transfer stands out among the bad actors, however, but that hasn’t prevented them from doing business in Pennsylvania.
For now, the Revolution pipeline isn’t being rebuilt. In fact, earlier this month, the DEP ordered the company to repair the damage done to waterways during construction. The company “illegally eliminated at least 23 streams by removing and/or filling the stream channels with soil, resulting in a loss of 1,857 feet of stream channel; changed the length of 120 streams by manipulating and/or filling the stream channels with soil, resulting in a loss of 1,310 feet of stream channel; and eliminated at least 17, and altered 70, wetlands by manipulating and/or filling wetlands with soil,” said the DEP in its press release announcing the order.
But that hasn’t stopped the company from working on the troubled Mariner East 2 pipeline project that crosses the state.
EdgeMarc Energy, a Canonsburg, PA-based drilling company, is blaming Energy Transfer’s actions for its recently-announced bankruptcy. The company had planned to move gas from its wells through the Revolution Pipeline. Energy Transfer is claiming the explosion was ‘an act of God’. EdgeMarc says otherwise.
In court documents quoted by the Post-Gazette, EdgeMarc claims, “The direct consequence of ETC’s conduct — including its well-documented failures to undertake necessary erosion and sediment control measures — was a landslide during the build out of the Revolution System, resulting in a segment of pipeline in Beaver County being displaced down a hill which caused a pipeline rupture and explosion on Sept. 10, 2018.”
Was it an act of God or many acts of incompetence and willful disregard for the rules?
Floods ravaged many parts of Pennsylvania last summer, including Center Township in Beaver County. They are among extreme weather events across the globe that are being linked to the unfolding climate crisis. Experts like Pennsylvania’s preeminent climate scientist, Dr. Michael Mann, say we can expect more extreme weather events if we fail to act on climate change. Indeed, the Associated Press just reported that Pennsylvania has already seen the number of tornadoes the state would typically see in a year.
More extreme weather events mean more opportunities for catastrophic failures in the natural gas system.
If the court accepts Energy Transfer’s ‘act of God’ claim, will it set a precedent other industry players can use as a get out of jail free card for climate-related disasters they helped create?
Earlier this month, driller EQT was fined $330,000 for erosion it failed to report at two well pads in Allegheny County. Even after inspectors spotted the problems, the erosion continued for 3 months at one of the sites and 9 months at the other. EQT is blaming unprecedented rainfall.
Even if the court sides with EdgeMarc in blaming Energy Transfer’s conduct for the Revolution explosion, it’s not going to change how Energy Transfer does its business. Nothing ever has and there’s no reason to think that’s going to change. As of April 30th, the number of permit violations at Pennsylvania’s 11,935 unconventional well sites alone totaled 12,717. Recidivist pipeline companies have observed that recidivist drillers have never been penalized too harshly and certainly never been stopped from operating in the state.
Range Resources, a company that has racked up 1,260 violations, was fined an historic $8.9 million in 2015 for failure to fix a well in Lycoming County that contaminated five private water wells, groundwater, and a stream. In 2017, the fine was tossed out for reasons that were never made clear. On Earth Day, this year, the Post-Gazette reported that the well is still leaking. Meanwhile, Range Resources is flourishing as one of the drivers of the current petrochemical boom.
As surely as the climate is changing, the behavior of the shale gas industry is not. That is something Governor Wolf, state legislators, and regulators will have to reckon with as extreme weather events become more frequent, more intense, and more unpredictable. What laws and regulations will be needed to manage construction and operation of shale gas infrastructure? To what specifications will wells, pipelines, other shale gas infrastructure need to be built in order to withstand the unknown? How will the state manage companies that will disregard the answers to these questions?
Years ago, I was among a group of environmental advocates who met with Scott Perry, head of the DEP’s Oil & Gas division. Perry introduced himself by saying that he had been at DEP when fracking was on the horizon and transferred to the Oil & Gas division because he wanted to be where the action was. You can’t call something the big new thing and then treat it like the old thing, but that’s exactly how Pennsylvania has treated shale gas development. No studies of potential impacts were conducted before allowing drilling in the state. No sweeping overhaul of the state’s oil and gas laws and regulations was done in advance of drilling. No huge investment into beefing up the state’s regulatory agencies was made.
Fifteen years and countless spills, leaks, fires, explosions, illnesses, and deaths later, our elected officials and regulators must learn from the experiences of Pennsylvanians like the residents of Ivy Lane as we enter the age of intensifying climate disruption. They must prepare to throw tons of resources and mountains of money at the concurrent problems of an industry bent on ignoring the climate chaos it is creating and the same industry quick to blame that chaos for its failures. Or they could do the right thing, the much cheaper and more effective thing, the thing that will give us our only chance to mitigate climate impacts for future generations, and ban greenhouse gas production outright.