Bad weld caused San Bruno pipeline explosion?

Maybe they cut it to remove it?

Engineman

Looks like it blew open in the center and the vibration busted the joint weld

I am the Sword of my Family and the Shield of my Nation. If sent, I will crush everything you have built, burn everything you love, and kill every one of you. (Hebrew quote)

============ While in one sense the disaster may indeed be the result of a bad weld [no inspection? no x-ray?], in the larger sense, the disaster was the easily foreseen outcome of the complete failure to criminally prosecute the accountable directors, officers, cadre management, and mid level supervisors for reckless endangerment and/or negligent homicide for prior disasters.

Fines and jury awards against the legal fiction of "the corporation" have little or no impact on the behaviors/actions of the people that run the corporations, but significant individual/personal fines and especially prison time, even short 30-90 day jail sentences, make a deep and lasting impression and reinforce the concept that actions [and omissions] have consequences. Huge salaries and bonuses should come complete with large amounts of [strict] accountability.

-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

It is scary in the big city, they don't care.

Back when I was a trouble shooter for pools I walked in the backyard of a customer and gas smell was so bad I was afraid the heater for the pool might have one of those old pilot lights and quickly hunted down the leak to the main line to the house and left. As soon as I got to the street a gas truck was rolling by, I flagged the dude down and told him and he said he couldn't do a thing about it until the customer called them. The customer was out of town, oh well.

Just before I left Vegas they had a run away railroad car full of chlorine that went through the whole town and maybe 200 yards from my kid's school. They didn't inform anyone, probably wouldn't have said a word if someone didn't drop the ball to the press. And they told everyone oh, it's no big deal chlorine dissipates fast. Yeah, right! Should bust a gallon bottle in their office and see the whole building get evacuated ASAP with people's lungs filling up with liquid. 30,000 gallons in your neighborhood, no problem.

It was no big deal about pepcon either and it burned for days and you couldn't get away from the smell.

Or the nuke site down wind mormons or leaking ground water off the site , no problem. Or the ammonium nitrate from pepcon in Calf. crops, NP.

When ya here " Nothing to worry about", worry.

SW

It does look like a bad weld... would love to see some sharp high resolution photos of all this.

However, I don't buy the bit about the 'gas line exploding'. How would it explode? There is little if any oxygen mixed in with the gas, and no ignition source.

I think it happened something like this:

The line developed a small leak for whatever reason, and over time gas accumulated in some adjacent area like a storm drain.[1] Did I hear correctly that it was windy that day? That certainly could have helped mix in some air. Once said mixture found an ignition source the pipe section was probably then broken and ejected up through the street along with tons of other debris in the explosion. From then on was the large fireball being fed from the now severed high volume gas line....

It will be interesting to see the the investigation results...

Erik

[1] TV reports I saw mentioned area residents had been smelling gas for some time.

Surprises me that steel pipes are still used.

Natural gas is lighter than air. So no collecting in a storm drain.

=20 Dan

Couldn't have been a bad weld. This was around San Fran so there is no way the welder could have be using DC "straight" polarity. (That's a joke...get it?)

But seriously: The possibility of sabotage exists. They have an amazing number of nuts out there in Cali. Dave

Maybe they cut it to remove it?

Engineman

Well, to start with, my computer says site has moved or does not exist or piffled into oblivion. I do not know if the line had an incident while being worked on, or just sitting there, decaying normally.

The whole weld does not need to fail to produce catastrophic results. A small failure can produce big results. Entire welds do not fail at the same time. There starts a failure in one place, and then it could spread along the whole weld, such as lateral tearing from shifting earth. If the weld was that bad throughout its length, it would have never made it past testing, and that includes the ultrasound and relatively primitive testing methods that predate X rays. If they had even done a NDT, (non-destructive testing) test and pressurized the pipeline to more than 100% of working pressure it would have all cut loose at that time.

From what I can state from 36 years of welding is this:

You have a pipeline in the ground that is nearly as old as I am (pipeline 50 years, me 62), that much corrosion, that many years of shifting under California earthquake activity, that many years of tie-ins (look it up) and repairs, and it blows up.

It's like someone looking at a car with 300,000 miles on it and saying, "Gollee, what could be the problem? It wuz running good yestiddy."

Pipelines are like anything else. They have a lifespan. To get excited that one that is fifty years old failed is not listening to the first few years of the report (at least the one I saw) "Half century pipeline explodes.

And that is even incorrect when you technically define what an "explosion" is versus brissance or conflagration.

But it makes much better press to say the word "EXPLOSION".

"BOO!"

Pipelines are like freezplugs in cars. They last for a while, but eventually they corrode even with the finest of antifreeze and the most meticulous of care. And when they fail, it causes everything to come to a halt.

It's just like you and me. Stuff gets old, and it wears out. It's that simple.

Steve

I was there for the Pepcon blast and the 90 ton chlorine spill. The chlorine spill scared me the most. But just as the US marching military personnel so close to nuclear detonations that they could see impressions of their retinas in their brain during the flash, the good old government said, "We would never EVER put our troops in harm's way. This is PERFECTLY safe!"

And then thousands died from twenty or thirty forms of extremely rare cancers APIECE.

My dad used to take me down to the edge of the desert in our tiny little town to see the big ball of fire and mushroom from the then above ground detonations. Glad we didn't suffer from The Downwinder's Syndrome. Glad also that I never ever spent any meaningful time up at the Test Site, where radiation badges were mandatory, but never read.

Steve

Cost. It is a simple risk vs. benefit equation that companies run, but when you factor in human nature you can see the immediate dangers inherant:

Steel is relatively cheap and plentiful, and can be made to virtually any bursting strength required. Company says, "Using steel, we build it faster, cheaper, and start raking in the bucks quicker."

Looking at the risks is difficult, cause you always have the, "it'll never happen to me, I'm too good at what I do, so why even think about a catastrophic failure too much! You wanna freak out the public and ruin the project??"

When you look at how much money the people who built the system have made from it, the money the people running the system make from it now, versus the money paid out in damages, you'll see why rust-prone steel is such a steal.

It also looks like a thin wall pipe. Pipe welders out there ?

Running close to the surface ??? and Garden/lawn chemicals may have eaten the outside in. Ground water a problem ?

Reported smelling for days before - maybe hydrogen in the pipe that softened the steel into a sponge. Internal destruction from gases.

Mart> >

That's it, always blame the welder! ;)

The failure may not be in the weld, so much as adjacent to the weld. All buttwelds must be at least the same thickness as the pipe at the minimum. There may not be a maximum reinforcement (amount of weld above pipe surface) given. The goal is to always have the base material fail before the weld fails. This is why welding rods and wires all exceed their advertised tensile strengths and why most welders will choose a rod or wire that is advertised as at least as stong as the steel of the pipe, usually stronger. Welds thicker than base material means the base rusts and bursts before the weld does. The other end of that pipe that's still in the hole may have a beautiful buttweld still on it.

We welders have also learned a lot in the 50 some-odd years since that pipeline was laid in there, I hope.

>

ah. finally got it to come up. Could you get any farther away than that?

I can't even tell what kind of car that is.

Steve

Timet...? I was gonna mention that one, but couldn't recall the name of that nasty place. What was it, titanium, yeap they had some lu lu spills of chlorine. I'm really surprised they never had one of those disasters like in India or where ever that was.

One time they were willing to let solar companies do tests at the test site. Had to have a 1/4 million dollar environmental study to see if a couple of post holes would hurt the glowing multi-eyed desert tortoise first though. Go figure.

My favorite was the chlorine levels in the tap water. Being in the water business I was well aware of the smell of chlorine and filling buckets with a garden sprayer for more than a decade. The levels where getting down right toxic as the lake shrank and they kept moving the water supply to deeper water and farther away from the cesspool, all the while listening to the reassurances of nothing's wrong with the water crap.

Never hear a word about how the rich fake lake is nothing but sewage and chemical plant drainage either. I figured they needed a settling tank before they dumped it into the water supply and then came up with this grand idea to make a ton of money on top of it all.

I saw a good one up here. Lots of boats with people fishing in the Fox river, EEE! That river couldn't possibly be even remotely clean already. I must admit that Green Bay and De Pere doesn't reek and make your eyes water anymore. I see even on google the bay looks bluish green, shocker. I remember banking out over the bay and laughing at why they didn't change the name to Brown Bay back in the early 70's.

All this incompetence and corruption reminds me of a time when I was in Hell A and bigger than normal stop signs where blurry from the smog only 40 feet away. I was outside of a restaurant smoking a cigarette and every woman that walked out gave me a dirty look like I was the one making their home unhealthy. fakey chicks too, they ALL wear black dresses just cause everybody should, couldn't even be original and wear something with color.

SW

BTW, one would think they would be really on top of underground gas lines in of all places, San Francisco !

Probably no tie-ins on this one, it appears that it is/was a high pressure transmission line, not a distribution line. Something around

600 PSI I believe?

"Sunworshipper" wrote

Timet was notorious locally for polluting the air. Sorry to poke holes in your balloon, but chlorine was not used much in the process. What happened a lot were magnesium fires, and blinding but harmless white clouds that would cover Henderson. Basic Metals Inc. BMI, was first created, and the plants were built to produce magnesium for metal and for incendiary bombs, but when they produced it so fast that they had enough on hand for five to eight years after the war ended, they shut down the plants in 1947. In 1953, the city was incorporated, as private industry was buying the sites.

Timet, through its history did have fires, flareups, and loss of gases, but never anything that threatened the town, or was capable of producing explosions. There were days at Townsite Elementary, in the center of town when we were kept inside because visibility was 100'. They basically melted down titanium ore and returned titanium items in an electric crucible. Nothing fancy and exotic like the Kerr McGee next door that made ammonium perchlorate solid rocket fuel, or Stauffer chemical that made thousands of rail cars of liquid chlorine. There was another plant on that row that escapes me at the moment. State Stove made hot water heaters. My Dad retired out of Stauffer. Like all the other dads of my friends, they retired, and were dead within five years of cancers of one type or another.

Lots of smoke, but not a lot of fire.

Steve

Indeed. The NTSB has very good metallurgical expertise on staff and on call; little escapes them. Until then, guess away.

But so what if it is 50 year old. Is it time to tear down that bridge nearby, or the slightly older one in Brooklyn?

That would be ..interesting... as this is/was a transmission line, not a distribution one. The methyl mercaptan is injected post-transmission.

As for the remark about steel pipe.... Given the 1000-2000 psi line pressure; you were expecting what instead of [likely] Sked 3000 steel; maybe PVC?

(My experiences is in liquid petroleum product, not gas, pipelines; but both go boom when you have a bad day.....)

I'm going to stick my neck out and predict .................

fingers to forehead .................

metal fatigue ................ metal failure .............. corrosion .................. age ............................ substrate shifting ................ movement from overhead traffic, either directly overhead or nearby .................... Venus in Scorpio.

Let me know how I did.

Steve