SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Pipe pressure before gas explosions was 12 times too high
The pressure in natural gas pipelines prior to a series of explosions and fires in Massachusetts last week was 12 times higher than it should have been, according to a letter from the state's U.S. senators to executives of the utility in charge of the pipelines.
Democratic U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey sent the letter Monday seeking answers about the explosions from the heads of Columbia Gas, the company that serves the communities of Lawrence, Andover and North Andover, and NiSource, the parent company of Columbia Gas.
"The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration has reported that the pressure in the Columbia Gas system should have been around 0.5 pounds per square inch (PSI), but readings in the area reached at least 6 PSI — twelve times higher than the system was intended to hold," the letter said.
The pressure spike registered in a Columbia Gas control room in Ohio, the senators said in the letter, which requests a reply by Wednesday.
See also: Columbia Gas pledges $10M toward relief efforts in Lawrence, Andover, North Andover
Previously: 60-80 Homes Burn; Gas Line "Incident" in Northern Massachusetts
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Wednesday September 19 2018, @02:58AM (1 child)
Between these deaths and this destruction, and what happened to San Bruno, California, there need to be criminal penalties for mis-operation of these gas lines. Manslaughter, at least, for the managers and operators responsible. If that has to happen at the federal level (since the operators seem to have states in their pockets), so be it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 19 2018, @12:26PM
I don't think that makes oversight any more effective. It only shifts whose pockets the payoffs flow into. It probably also boosts the amount of the payoffs, since state-level operators can generally be had on the cheap. Those payoffs, in turn, get passed on to the customers, because why should the operator suffer a hit to their profit margins to pay for the bribes they need to pay to protect their profit margins?
In theory, local oversight should be best because those people have the most incentive to make sure gas pipelines don't explode and burn down their homes and kill their children. But that tends to not work, either, because out of the set of people who care about what government is doing on a daily basis, those who care about what local government is doing is miniscule, as in, you can count them on one hand and have fingers left over miniscule.
In essence it's a tragedy born of misaligned incentives. Any time you can use a vehicle like a corporation to produce individual gains while shielding them from individual responsibility, you are going to have corruption.
The only way to put an emphatic end to corruption and events like these is to make the CEOs and top officers of companies personally liable for the actions (or lack of actions) their companies take. Think what a difference it would have made, in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, if everyone from the C-suite down to mid-level managers at the banks had had all their personal wealth and assets seized to make restitution to their victims, and then been thrown into jail for 20 years or executed for malfeasance.
Washington DC delenda est.