I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
At Albuquerque’s busy Montgomery and Carlisle Blvd. intersection, managers of a hair salon and flower shop expressed shock Saturday over news reports that the PNM work crews that had dug up their parking lot in 2008 were responding to a potentially explosive natural gas pipeline leak.
The leak had been allowed to languish without repair for two months, between May and July 2008, The Independent reported Friday.
“One of the (PNM) guys, he said, ‘let’s see if we blow the place up’,” Ray Lueras told The Independent Saturday. “I thought he was joking but I remember looking at him because he wasn’t laughing.”
Lueras owns the Hair’s to You salon, between an adjoining flower shop and the buried pipeline.
“I’d smelled gas in the back and thought there was a leak at the meter, so I called it in,” Albuquerque Wholesale Florist manager Robert Torres said, shaking his head. “Nobody took smoke breaks out back, thank God.”
The Carlisle entrance to the businesses’ parking lot was closed for more than a week while PNM crews worked, both men said.
In 2000, a campfire near a leaking natural gas pipeline southeast of Carlsbad caused an explosion that killed 12 campers, including five children. The following year, a small gas pipeline leak in Santa Fe led to an explosion that leveled a business building after an employee lit a cigarette.
‘There was no precaution’
“They dug it all up, built a big container there and did pipe work and I don’t know what else,” Lueras said. “But they didn’t tell me there was a leak. I’m a little disappointed we weren’t at least told about it, if not warned. What if somebody had gone out there to light a cigarette? There was no precaution.”
The amount and concentration of gas from the leak was enough to cause a significant explosive hazard, according to records at the state Public Regulatory Commission (PRC)’s Pipeline Safety Bureau. But according to Lueras and Torres, PNM crews did not explain what they were doing, and no legally-required barricades or warning signs were posted around the work site.
Nine people interviewed by PRC investigators said PNM personnel entered the underground vault around the pipeline without checking oxygen levels and without training for confined space work, according to a September 2009 PRC pipeline safety investigator’s report. It was also unclear whether or not explosion-proof flashlights were used by the work crew, the report states.
Improperly placed pressure relief valves could have allowed gas leaking from the pipeline to escape into the adjacent businesses, an October 2008 PRC report states.
“It’s a little scary,” Torres said Saturday. “I have family and friends come in here all the time. My grandchildren come here.”
Pausing, Torres shook his head again.
“Man, I wouldn’t have come to work,” he said. “It’s not worth my life or my employees’ lives.”
Torres walked along the back of the building Saturday, pointing to asphalt patches where the PNM crews had dug up a swath of the parking lot and around the bases of three gas meters next to the building shared by the businesses.
Some of the crew’s patchwork in the parking lot is visible in satellite imagery at Google Maps, just south of a black dumpster.
PNM is subject to $500,000 in fines for violations of the Pipeline Safety Act and state regulations. But PNM and Public Regulation Commission (PRC) Pipeline Safety Bureau staff have agreed to a proposed “compromise payment” settlement of $66,000 for the incident and failures to properly “odorize” natural gas between 2006 and 2008, according to PRC records.
PRC Commissioners will review and approve or disapprove the settlement Monday.
“I think they should be fined the whole amount,” Torres said Saturday. “That was not right not to tell us (of the hazard).”
PRC commissioners will take public testimony Monday morning before deciding next month whether or not to accept the proposed $66,000 settlement that was negotiated between pipeline safety staff and PNM, Albuquerque PRC Commissioner Jason Marks told The Independent.
“Somebody made a decision that we’ll try to hide this,” Marks said. “I don’t know how high it went (but) it’s pretty serious.”
Residents worry about pipeline’s safety
A large apartment complex shares the rear parking lot with the businesses on the corner.
A dark-haired boy tilted his bicycle over the patched asphalt in a lazy figure-eight as Torres described the PNM crews’ work there two years ago.
A block to the north, where Carlisle comes to an abrupt dead-end, smoke from the Pacheco family’s Saturday barbeque wafted across Carlisle to a pair of emergency gas line pressure release vents.
Frayed duct tape binds two of the pipes in the H-shaped structure.
The vents have been there for more than five years, and while he has never smelled gas, the vents have worried Juan Pacheco for much of that time.
“That regulator worries me a lot,” Pacheco said, nodding toward the vents. “There’s no (street) outlet here so semis are always backing up there at night, with no street lights. They get half-jackknifed there. One of these days, somebody will run over the regulator and kill everybody.”
The vents are surrounded by several two-and-a-half foot tall red bollards, but that’s not enough to stop a semi-trailer, Pacheco worries.
“Look at the parking lot bollards there,” he said, pointing to barriers protecting the side of an apartment complex across the street, behind the gas line vents. “Those ones are five feet tall.”
“That ought to be fenced off from the public,” said Juan Pacheco’s father, Leroy Pacheco, who was visiting Albuquerque from Truth or Consequences. “That’s public housing over there. There are a lot of kids.”
Both men are pipe fitters. Leroy Pacheco worked on natural gas lines for ten years in San Juan and Rio Arriba counties, in northern New Mexico, he said.
“Up there, where a pipeline goes under the highway, they have an extra sleeve encasing the pipeline, and vent pipes on either side of the road,” as safety features, Leroy Pacheco said.
No vent pipes exist at the Montgomery and Carlisle intersection, but federal regulations require vents only at railroad and highway crossings, The Independent has confirmed.
