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.
Photo by Rick Z.
Just a week after the San Bruno blast, Mountainair, N.M. town officials appearing before the PRC Tuesday found commissioners reluctant to approve what they had expected to be a routine regulatory waiver for town pipeline fittings that do not comply with federal pipeline safety requirements.
“We’d hate to see the town blow up,” PRC chairman David King said at the hearing.
Commissioner Jason Marks said utilities needed to do more to ensure public safety.
“There’s this pattern of companies doing something but not doing enough, not taking things seriously enough,” Marks said. “It’s not that they don’t care. The problem is that the responses aren’t sufficiently large, given the scale of the dangers.”
Federal pipeline safety regulations can be waived by state regulators under certain circumstances, but commissioners tabled the proposed waiver pending further review and research by Pipeline Safety Bureau staff and the town.
The commissioners were overly cautious, Mountainair officials complained.
“They’ve been in the ground since 1988,” Mountainair Mayor Chester Riley said of the polyethylene pipeline fittings in question. “We’ve never had a problem with anything in this town. I’ve been here a long time. I’ve just took over in March, but everything was OK.”
“I think we need to look at things objectively,” Marks said. “We did that on the PNM gas leak. That was an extremely dangerous condition, according to all testimony – an explosive combination of gas in a heavily traveled area. Mountainair is a potential problem. I suggested we look into the fittings and whether they’re robust. We also heard that the Pipeline Safety Bureau has identified and addressed leaks in the (Mountainair) system that were not connected to these polyethylene fittings.”
“We need to approach all these things objectively but we cannot compromise on safety,” Marks said.
Public Regulation Commission (PRC) regulators recently fined PNM a record $371,000 for a potentially explosive 2008 PNM pipeline leak in Albuquerque.
As in the case of the two-month long 2008 leak at the busy intersection of Albuquerque’s Carlisle and Montgomery Blvds, gas company workers in California repeatedly visited the site of the San Bruno leak without fixing it — and failed to warn locals of the explosive hazard, according to press reports quoting outraged San Bruno residents.
San Bruno residents’ anger echoed complaints by business owners in Albuquerque, where PNM work crews failed to warn residents and businesses of the explosive hazard posed by a gas leak beneath the intersection.
“I smelled gas in the back and thought there was a leak at the meter, so I called it in,” recalled Albuquerque florist Robert Torres of the 2008 leak. “Nobody took smoke breaks out back, thank God.”
The crater left by the San Bruno explosion was 15 feet deep.
The Montgomery and Carlisle leak in Albuquerque could have left a “huge crater” in the intersection had a lit cigarette have been dropped on a manhole, state Pipeline Safety Bureau chief Jason N. Montoya recently told The Independent.
New Mexico has one of the nation’s deadliest pipeline accident records, according to a recent report by the National Wildlife Federation. 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.
After a pipeline fire in northwest Albuquerque at Paseo del Norte and Golf Course Road last month, Montoya noted that companies commonly wait until a pipeline fault causes problems to locate and repair corrosion issues.
“The first lesson of San Bruno is the terrible cost of being complacent. We all feel a lot of remorse over what’s happened out there. A guy from PG&E was on television the other night saying money cannot bring back lives and lost homes and disrupted lives. You just cannot afford complacency. When leaks are identified they need to be dealt with immediately. That’s the message we sent a few months ago with the fine against PNM,” Marks said.
