When a gasoline pipeline burst late last year in southern New Mexico, local officials wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. But the county and state don’t have much authority over the line.
Late one night last December, several residents of a small, rural area near Anthony heard an explosion and smelled gas. A gasoline pipeline had burst, spilling more than 10,000 barrels of fuel into a drainage ditch.
The pipeline was temporarily shut off and repaired. A cleanup crew recovered much of the gas, but tens of thousands of gallons soaked into the ground, contaminating soil and groundwater.
Nearly two months after the spill, cleanup efforts were still underway, and the site still smelled like gasoline.
Shannon Reynolds, a Doña Ana County Commissioner, visited the site on a windy February morning. He stood near a large yellow backhoe.
“They’re still bringing the soil that actually has gasoline in it, and they’re piling it up on the side of the ditch here for later removal to a safe location,” he said.
Reynolds wants to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again. But neither the county nor the state of New Mexico have much control over the pipeline. That’s because it’s an interstate pipeline, spanning three states and nearly three hundred miles.
The Santa Fe Pacific Pipeline runs from El Paso to Tucson, pumping more than three thousand barrels of gas every hour. It’s owned by energy giant Kinder Morgan, one of the largest pipeline companies in North America.
Interstate pipelines are regulated by the federal government. Specifically, the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration or PHMSA. The agency oversees about two and a half million miles of pipelines nationwide.
The state does oversee the remediation process, whenever there’s a spill involving a water contaminant.
Justin Ball is with the New Mexico Environment Department. When a pipeline bursts or a transfer truck rolls over on the highway, his office gets involved.
“They need to tell us what they spilled, how they spilled it, where they spilled it, who they are, who owns the property, who’s the operator,” Ball says. “Basic information. And need to tell us within 24 hours of the spill.”
Then they come up with a remediation plan, which his department has to approve and monitor.
“Under the regulations, there is a specific process for them to clean up the site and for us to overview it and give our judgment on that,” he says.
But when it comes to actual pipeline, the state doesn’t have much power. PHMSA is the one making sure Kinder Morgan takes corrective measures, to figure out what caused the pipeline break and work to prevent other leaks in the future. It also determines when the company can turn the line back on.
That makes Commissioner Shannon Reynolds uneasy.
“One of the things that I was concerned with when we first started talking about this is the fact that they restarted the gas line before they actually knew what the problem was,” Reynolds says. He’s also concerned that Kinder Morgan didn’t perform in-line testing on the rest of the pipeline before they turned on the gas, to see if other sections were compromised.
“I’m concerned that because the pipes are old, we run the risk of another pipe bursting somewhere near this community in a very short amount of time,” he says. “We can address the cleanup. I’d rather address the cause and use preventative measures to make sure we don’t have a spill like this ever again.
One measure he’d like to see: automatic shut off valves near residential areas, so when there’s a sudden, dramatic drop in pressure, the gas stops flowing immediately.
Allen Fore, Vice President of Public Affairs for Kinder Morgan, says he understands these concerns but stresses that the company followed federal regulations.
“The federal agency that ultimately is in charge of this process, the agency that regulates our operations, said it was safe to put the pipeline back in operation,” he says. “So we followed their regulations, which include a pressure test. That’s the standard process for understanding the integrity of a pipeline.”
Fore says pipelines are the safest way to transport critical products like gas, and that the vast majority of these projects make it to their final destinations.
“That means the gasoline in this line gets to our facilities and then to gas stations and then to your cars,” Fore says. “So it’s the best way to transport. But it’s not a perfect system. And you do have incidents. And what you do from those is you learn from those. That will help us and other operators and the regulatory systems better understand how we can make our pipeline systems even safer.”
Still, some local officials, like Shannon Reynolds, would like more of a hand in making the pipeline system safer, since it runs through local counties, and they’re the ones affected when things go wrong.
