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posted by takyon on Friday September 14 2018, @06:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the whoops,-wrong-valve dept.

An estimated 60 to 80 fires, 3 explosions, and numerous gas leaks were reported last night in the towns around Lawrence, MA (north of Boston). The incident has been linked to lines operated by Columbia Gas of Massachusetts. Columbia Gas has not released an official cause yet, but MEMA (The Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency) and some of the local firefighters have speculated that the cause was an over-pressurized gas line. Columbia was conducting planned upgrades on the lines at the time of the incident. One person has been killed; 25 more have been injured.

I was listening to the fire radio as it happened and it sounded like complete chaos -- it was just the dispatch, but there was not a single moment of silence as they scrambled to get crews to all of the affected areas and coordinate the response across four separate towns (Lawrence, Andover, North Andover, and Methuen.) The local first responders were initially asking residents to shut off their gas lines; this quickly changed to calls for all Columbia Gas customers to evacuate, which then increased to an order for immediate evacuation of the entire area. Overnight police and fire officials were going door-to-door enforcing the evacuation, and it is not known at this time when residents may be allowed to return. The electric service has been shut down to the entire area to limit possible sources of ignition, and officials have stated there are over 8000 homes which need to be individually inspected before the residents can return.

So far, Columbia Gas has not provided any confirmation or explanation of the exact cause of this disaster...but I'm sure we've got some people here who have some speculation to offer...

The local Eagle Tribune has a number of articles with further information, and there's limited coverage in national sources like CNN.


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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by jmorris on Friday September 14 2018, @07:57PM (23 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday September 14 2018, @07:57PM (#735014)

    We know they were doing an upgrade and a lot of stuff want kaboom. Speculation as to why is productive since it is almost certain we will never be told anything approaching a reason.

    1. Intentional. They hired some "kill em all" diversity instead of the more typical incompetent sort.

    2. Intentional. Despite having sound security measures an infiltrator made it in.

    3. Incompetence. They hired too much diversity. Or somebody's cousin. But unless the rot has festered so long all of the written procedures and designs are now useless, they had enough safeguards, double checks and failsafe systems that one moron should not be able to account for a disaster of this scale. This sort of thing requires whole crews be idiots.

    4. The gas company isn't responsible, someone else used an opportunity, a manhole left unattended, etc. created by the planned and announced system upgrade.

    There really aren't any options that wouldn't require major consequences, which is why it will be allowed to vanish into the coverage of the Deathstorm from Hell with a side of Russia!, Russia!, Russia!

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  • (Score: 2) by Tara Li on Friday September 14 2018, @08:07PM (1 child)

    by Tara Li (6248) on Friday September 14 2018, @08:07PM (#735021)

    Bloody *HELL* - not even Drudge has this up! WTF????

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @09:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @09:17PM (#735067)

      maybe everybody took friday off

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @08:08PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @08:08PM (#735024)

    4. The gas company isn't responsible, someone diverse used an opportunity, a manhole left unattended, etc. created by the planned and announced system upgrade.

    FTFY

    er, one other

    Diversitystorm from Hell with a side of Diversity!, Diversity!, Diversity!

    there we are

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @08:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @08:23PM (#735030)

    It's almost certainly 3 - but because this is Mass, it's probably worse than you are imagining.

    When they investigate, they'll find that was designed won't be what's actually in the ground. Corners will have been cut, and all kinds of money will be found to have evaporated without a trace. They'll find that the contractors in the area did something similar in parallel, and that a significant number of new houses in the area aren't up to code. They'll find that the problem has been around for years, but just failed now because of a perfect storm of stupidity. The current crew doing something dumb to the old crew's dumbness.

    If they blew up Lawrence alone, honestly, nothing would be done. There'd be a lot of hand waving and maybe a settlement. But because they also blew up some relatively well off places, a few heads will have to roll to satisfy the public. It won't be national news because it'll be embarrassing - the heads will almost certainly have ties to state government officials - but it'll be in the local news.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday September 14 2018, @08:30PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday September 14 2018, @08:30PM (#735037)

    Here's my speculation:

    A lot of these homes are older and haven't changed hands in decades. That means that their gas lines have probably not been inspected or maintained by anybody recently. Or, if they have been maintained, what was going on is that the gas company employee would stop by the house, take at most a couple of minutes to look at the lines and check the box on the form saying they're OK. They probably are encouraged to cut corners by managers who want them to meet ever higher quotas for how many lines they inspect. This resulted in a gas system that according to the bureaucracy could handle a much higher PSI than it could in practice. The people working on the maintenance project made their decisions based on what was happening on paper / in the computer database, and not on what was going on in reality because they had no way of knowing the paper numbers were false.

    No need for anything intentional or concerns about "diversity". Human stupidity and company bureaucracy is more than sufficient.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 14 2018, @08:32PM (6 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 14 2018, @08:32PM (#735040)

    I'm guessing the investigation will point to a formerly unanticipated dynamic behavior of the system which will get written up as a case study for future engineers. If that case study looks a little wonky, or never publishes, then, yeah, they're hiding the real cause.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 14 2018, @09:12PM (5 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @09:12PM (#735064)

      formerly unanticipated dynamic behavior of the system

      Much like switching power supplies are a negative resistance element in a power grid which makes life exciting when there's "too many" of them, maybe pressure regulators feeding "too many" natgas peaking plants creates a local negative resistance element.

      Negative resistance elements make great oscillators.

      Unlike electrical stuff, I would imagine fluid dynamics and subsonic flow rates make it much harder to make a natgas oscillator than an electrical oscillator. Which might be exactly why no one worries about it until "kaboom"...

      My gut level guess if its not "oh shit I thought you said 250 psi not 25 psi" is cascading failure modes. Someone totally F-ed up a large line resulting in a slug of very high momentary flow rate resulting in rusty grunge blowing downstream jamming up regulators open or close precisely when they need to move the fastest to calm the pressure wave leading to a big mess. Natgas is not, like, pharmacological pure and there's grunge in there to clog stuff up, which can be handled at normal rates but not so well during a crazy accident.

      • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Friday September 14 2018, @11:30PM (4 children)

        by jmorris (4844) on Friday September 14 2018, @11:30PM (#735144)

        You mean old switching power supplies without PFC (Power Factor Correction) features. Now it is only really crappy low end products that cause problems. Too bad most of the marketplace is filled with cheap crappy Chinese junk.

        • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday September 15 2018, @08:04AM (3 children)

          by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Saturday September 15 2018, @08:04AM (#735231) Homepage Journal

          Can someone explain to me what switching and nonswitching power supplies are and how they work and differ? They've been mentioned off and on here, and I haven't been able to find an explanation..

          • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Saturday September 15 2018, @09:42AM

            by shortscreen (2252) on Saturday September 15 2018, @09:42AM (#735243) Journal

            The big plastic bricks that used to come with the Atari and Commodore contained a transformer to turn 120VAC into a lesser AC voltage, followed by a rectifier/regulator to turn it into 5VDC. These things were not very efficient and only put out 10W or so. A switching power supply is more complicated, but more efficient. Instead of controlling the output voltage by dissipating the excess as waste heat, it feeds a high frequency into a big capacitor and varies the duty cycle to maintain the charge. It's like trying to keep your speedometer at 60mph but instead of holding the accelerator pedal steady you repeatedly floor it and then let off, 100,000 times per second.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @12:36PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @12:36PM (#735277)

            A linear or regulated power supply uses a transformer to downscale/upscale the voltage from AC input to the required output voltage followed by a rectifier to convert to DC, then gets out of the way to let the rest of the system (the power line and equipment) handle the power transfer. Any mismatch in supply and demand (power transfer is fast, but not instantaneous) is immediately dissipated as heat. A switched-mode power supply has the rectifier first, then generates its own AC signal at around 100kHz or higher, and feeds that into a transformer. Because of the much higher frequency, the transformer can be much smaller, and because of the more intelligent circuitry, the power draw can be much better controlled resulting in less heat dissipation.

            Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has its own explanation and comparison:

            A switching-mode power supply continually switches between low-dissipation, full-on and full-off states, and spends very little time in the high dissipation transitions, which minimizes wasted energy. [..]Voltage regulation is achieved by varying the ratio of on-to-off time. In contrast, a linear power supply regulates the output voltage by continually dissipating power.

          • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 17 2018, @01:46PM

            by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 17 2018, @01:46PM (#735957)

            Totally unfair not to provide an automobile analogy

            Linear supplies control yer car speed VERY roughly using the transformer/holding down the accelerator to some angle and locking it at X percent output. Then fine tune the speed by pressing on the brakes generating some amount of heat depending on load (uphill? downhill?) and depending on input voltage (held the accelerator down too much or too little?) Its actually a bad analogy because the accelerator controls power but transformers actually control voltage which when multiplied by current gives you power.

            Switchers work like a crazy person either foot to the floor or put it in neutral and coast. Which is hard on the mechanical parts but is a fairly reasonable way to run a switching power supply or air compressor or home HVAC furnace if they're engineered to do it. The reason why you'd do it is the energy cost when its in neutral is zero (assuming engine cut off completely not merely idling) and the efficiency of engines -n- stuff is usually designed to be maximum at full power for handwavy reasons so on average the efficiency is roughly the theoretical max of the engine despite the fact you might only average 25 mph not whatever flooring it eventually approaches.

            Or even shorter but worse analogy is linear is like old person controlling speed by riding the brake whereas switcher is kinda like controlling speed by heavily manipulating a hybrid car system.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 14 2018, @09:24PM (1 child)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @09:24PM (#735073)

    5. I've worked at several infrastructure companies and documentation is stereotypically awful, so some CAD guy in 1995 who's been gone for two decades, mis-copied something off the engineering notes when transcribing the old paper plans into CAD and the field note corrections never made it into the CAD drawing because who knows it was 1996 they were busy, then when they tried to do the upgrade its all ohshit.jpg the paperwork said to set the new regulators to 85 psi to match the old regs, but the old regs were set to 25 psi and now the pressure transient blew a ton of stuff that was rusty but would have slowly broken over the next couple decades, all fail completely and instantly.

    Oh ha ha how about that, pipe #252 was labeled on site and in CAD as a high pressure feeder to the next subdivision but the guy who retired back in 2005 knows it is actually a low pressure residential run, whoopsie.

    The worst part is documentation is usually bad enough to cause the occasional disaster but good enough to strongly encourage reliance upon it in between the disasters. Maybe people are more careful in natgas land, but ... probably not, human nature and all that.

    • (Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Sunday September 16 2018, @01:00AM

      by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Sunday September 16 2018, @01:00AM (#735506)

      I got an apartment complex of over evacuated in 1984. I was a plumber digging up a sewer pipe in back of one of the buildings to install a clean out access.
      I cut though a plastic feeder pipe to the gas meter. The spec at the time was it was supposed to be >3 feet and covered by no less than 1 foot of sand (so you would see the sand and know to quit fucking digging). It was 6 inches below the surface and and my first shovelful cut it in half.

      So yeah, the reality and the standard frequently have little to do with each other.

      --
      Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @09:30PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 14 2018, @09:30PM (#735077)

    5, Shit''s old and decrepit in the east coast.

  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 14 2018, @10:27PM (5 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @10:27PM (#735112) Journal

    We don't need no stinkin' terr'ists, we can do it all by ourselves, in the good old socialize-costs corporate style.
    MAGAAAA!

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by MostCynical on Friday September 14 2018, @11:35PM (3 children)

      by MostCynical (2589) on Friday September 14 2018, @11:35PM (#735150) Journal

      Just need to find the political or financial angle.

      Oh, you mean the money came from not doing maintenance and it has already been spent/ allocated to efficiency bonuses.. carry on.

      --
      "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 14 2018, @11:46PM

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @11:46PM (#735154) Journal

        I don't dare to be more subtle than I was, lest the meaning will be lost.

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 14 2018, @11:54PM (1 child)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @11:54PM (#735156) Journal

        That and the "Do it yesterday, stop that engineering babble we can't afford the time to check, we have a schedule to meet (otherwise I can kiss goodbye my bonus this year)" business exec managerial style.

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Saturday September 15 2018, @03:27AM

          by MostCynical (2589) on Saturday September 15 2018, @03:27AM (#735204) Journal

          "I'll just have to hire someone who will do it my way."

          I imagine, once you've outsourced/contracted/gutted the technicians, linesmen, technicsl supervisors, engineers, engineering supervisors, quality assurance, technical verification, there really isn't much left to do but write memos about contracts and collect bonuses.

          Also see Australian phone system, gas and water infrastructure, and likely any other "first world" country.

          --
          "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @06:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @06:00PM (#735359)

      probably your beloved union's lazy ass fault.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 14 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 14 2018, @10:47PM (#735121) Journal

    This sort of thing requires whole crews be idiots.

    Maybe. Or, maybe just one idiot who failed to follow orders and/or procedures. In some cases, two or three idiots. True story: we were pouring concrete where we couldn't get a concrete truck. The options available included a pumper truck, or setting up a small crane with a bucket. The bucket held 1/3 yard of concrete, and usually, when reaching as far as was necessary in this case, the bucket was only filled 1/2 full. There should have been nothing to talk about, we've all done this so many times, it's routine. Except - the crane operator couldn't find a spot he liked, where he could extend his stabilizers all the way. Superintendant told crane operator to just extend those stabilizers as far as they would go - everything would be fine. Operator objected, super threatened the operator's job, so operator obeyed orders.

    You've guessed it by now - the crane tipped over with about the third bucket of concrete swung over to the pour.

    Fortunately for the operator, there were witnesses who heard the super threaten to fire the operator. Operator kept his job, the super was sent out the gate. THAT sort of justice seldom happens.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @06:54AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 15 2018, @06:54AM (#735223)

      Witnesses or not the super should have been fired. The operator may have been fired as well if there weren't witnesses to the objection.

      This is one of the reasons why American is going down the crapper, people issuing orders that aren't ultimately responsible for the consequences.