Recent Massachusetts Explosions Can Happen in Any Gas System
BU expert Nathan Phillips says Merrimack Valley crisis is far from over
Firefighters battle one of many blazes that ignited in Lawrence, Mass., September 13, caused by a series of gas line explosions. More than 8,500 homes in the Merrimack Valley remain without gas. Photo by Associated Press
One person dead, 25 injured, dozens of homes and businesses scorched or destroyed, a utility on the hook for medical, property replacement, and other bills: that’s the tally after gas lines exploded September 13 in three communities in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, north of Boston, leaving rubble in their wake.
Columbia Gas, the utility serving the communities, says it will replace 48 miles of aging pipelines by November 19. Gas service to 8,600 customers was shut off after the disaster, which happened as Columbia workers were replacing pipes in Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover.
With regulation of the underground web of gas pipelines entrusted largely to the utilities themselves, what are the chances that a similar disaster will play out elsewhere? Jittery communities across the country are asking just that question. We spoke to Nathan Phillips, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of earth and environment and an expert on the subject. Phillips hunts leaks in the country’s natural gas lines, including thousands in Boston alone, and has done extensive research on it.
BU Today: I understand you’ve been at the site. What were you doing there?
Phillips: I first visited the Lawrence Senior Center the Sunday following the explosions to drop off the first of 120 portable induction cooktops. Since electricity was restored a couple days after the explosions, but gas is still shut down and may be for months in thousands of households, the immediate need and the opportunity to provide induction cooktops presented itself. I had familiarity with induction as an alternative to gas. Getting these low-cost and efficient cooktops into homes needing them has been my singular focus over the last week.
I started a Gofundme campaign called “Clean Cooking Now.” As part of initiatives like our BU URBAN (Urban Biogeoscience & Environmental Health) program, we strive to make our research socially relevant. Moreover, colleagues like Wendy Heiger-Bernays, a School of Public Health clinical professor of environmental health, and her students are mobilizing to take the lead in making sure that the pots and pans that affected residents use with their new induction cooktops are chemically safe.
Do we know the cause of the explosions, beyond the fact that they involved gas lines?
It’s clear that a system-level over-pressurization of the distributed pipeline network occurred, which instantly drove pressure as high as 75 pounds per square inch (PSI)—about the pressure in a commuter bike tire—into the pipelines feeding homes and appliances that should have been operating at 0.5 PSI. Piecing together information from a press briefing, it appears that a routine removal of a pipe from the aging, leaking pipeline system was done without first removing a pressure sensor on that old pipe that had regulated how much gas to feed. When that old pipe was capped and the gas pressure went to zero, the control system was told to feed more pressure into it, without end.
What are the chances of such explosions happening in aging gas lines elsewhere in the state and country?
The risk profile for gas explosions is “low probability, high impact.” A gas system requires constant vigilance to guard against failures. What happened in the Merrimack Valley can happen in any gas system, as they are centralized, often single point-of-failure network systems with little redundancy. Human error like construction digging strikes are the number one cause nationally of pipeline incidents. The last biggest event from Columbia Gas was a 2012 explosion in Springfield, Mass., caused by a gas worker searching for a gas leak and inadvertently puncturing a gas line; 18 people were injured and 42 buildings damaged or destroyed.
Has the Columbia Gas response to this month’s disaster been sufficient overall?
Financial assistance to the affected is instantly needed for items like meals and consumables, but that is effective only if residents can obtain them rapidly, without standing in long lines and sometimes being asked to return with more documentation. Moreover, in a climate of fear over immigration status, we know that many families are shut out of relief efforts. In terms of financial assistance for getting home appliances, while the commitment to pay for alternative appliances is necessary and was the right thing to do, it is insufficient to address the urgency of the problem. The delivery of hot plates that started six days after our fledgling effort is both an indication of this recognition and evidence that the emergency response could have moved faster.
What should government and utility officials do about this issue that they aren’t doing?
The rollout of hot plates and space heaters in the last couple of days is finally providing relief at a scale that is necessary. There are 8,517 households without gas, a majority of which can’t provide hot meals and showers, likely for months in some cases. This is a dire situation, and hot plates and space heaters help, but are not going to cut it in the winter.
Columbia Gas has just announced that it will compensate household customers to make a permanent switch off gas to heat their homes. This is a remarkable offer by a gas utility, essentially offering people to quit being customers and paying them to do it. This appears to be an admission that Columbia is not going to be able to fix the situation for many in time for the approaching winter, and it’s a green light to a wider commencement of an immediate energy transition. As remarkable is a lack of consideration that the most rapid and cost-effective response that must commence this week is insulation triage. Teams should be fanning out across the region, taping transparent heat films over windows and taping heat-leaking cracks. These measures will work in synergy with modern and available electric heat pumps to save energy and ameliorate expected electricity cost increases.
I already see in communities like my own, Newton, that people are thinking that when the explosions and fires ended, so did the crisis. We must understand that with winter coming and 8,517 homes without gas and a dubious time frame for restoration of energy for heating, a mounting crisis is unfolding before our eyes.
Mutual aid has been amazing, from first responders to locked-out gas workers showing up to help without even being paid. But the mutual aid is going to need to increase to include, for example, regional places of worship to consider creating disaster sanctuary spaces to temporarily house families who may need to abandon their homes if the gas is not back on when cold weather arrives.
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