Pipelines Leak and the People Who Own Them Lie

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

22 April 15

iger Beat On The Potomac almost gets it right today in its longform analysis of the dangers of the country's energy pipelines, and, specifically, of how the Pipeline And Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which is supposed to be the federal regulatory body governing the nation's pipeline, has been rendered toothless by the usual suspects -- except, alas, the usual suspects go unnamed. It doesn't make me want to guzzle the Chateau Petrus, but it's worth a nice cold Leinie's lager in a frosted schooner.

"There is nowhere today the sense that the Office of Pipeline Safety is in charge," Jim Hall said then, "or that its regulations, its inspections, its assets, its staffing and its spirit are adequate to the task." Bellingham was supposed to change that. But more than 15 years later, Hall says he sees little evidence of meaningful improvements. "Unfortunately," he told POLITICO, "I think I would give the same speech today."

There are some genuinely terrifying statistics about how old some of these pipelines are, and the piece is admirably replete with horror stories about what happens when pipelines leak and when they explode, or both, some of which got by me completely because, often, they take place in out of the way places. You know, the kind of places where Real Americans live, according to many of the politicians who patronize them every couple of years and then arrange the economy so that their backyards turn to glop and their pastures detonate.

The ruptured pipe leaked more than 840,000 gallons of oil sands crude into a creek that fed the Kalamazoo River, ultimately spreading for 35 miles. The operator, Canadian oil giant Enbridge, misread alarms in its control room and twice tried to pump more fuel through the broken line. Seventeen hours passed before oil was shut off for good. At the time, it was the largest onshore oil spill in U.S. history. But Marshall got scant attention in 2010 as the public and policymakers focused on the Gulf of Mexico. The Zinn family saw the Michigan disaster up close. The family's land was a few hundred feet from the nearly 7-foot gash in Enbridge's pipeline. Four decades earlier, the family's patriarch, Frank Zinn, had fought in vain to stop the 30-inch-diameter pipe from being laid across his property. He had been assured that a major spill was unlikely.

The companies lie. Pipelines leak. Pipelines explode. People die. The companies lie again.

It does seem from the story that PHMSA is fairly hopeless at this point, but good luck getting the monkeyhouse to pass any legislation to deal with the fact that huge swaths of the country are basically land mines at this point. In fact, there are a couple of macro questions that the TBOTP does not confront in a major way, and they are vividly illustrated in this account of the disastrous 2013 rupture that deluged Mayflower, Arkansas with 200,000 gallons of heavy crude.

The Little Rock suburb's congressman at the time was Tim Griffin, a staunch Republican and former Karl Rove aide who is skeptical of federal regulations and strongly in favor of pipelines. But after the Pegasus pipe burst, forcing the evacuation of 21 homes, Griffin challenged PHMSA's secrecy in a way that few others have. When ExxonMobil, the owner of the 65-year-old pipeline, refused to release the full engineering analysis conducted after the leak, PHMSA deferred to the oil company's decision. So Griffin obtained a copy of the massive report and posted it on his congressional website. Weeks later, he released three more reports on the failed pipeline's condition that ExxonMobil and PHMSA had tried to keep under wraps. "They politely requested that I not" share the data, Griffin recalled in an interview. "And I did."

Griffin, now serving as Arkansas's Lieutenant Governor, is a true believer. In fact, he was one of the U.S. Attorneys that got jammed into office when Karl Rove was ratfking the Department of Justice during the last administration. As a member of Congress, he was very much the typical conservative on the subject of environmental laws, and federal regulations in general. What he did in this case was very much the right thing but, just for the hell of it, let's check his most recent campaign and see how deeply the lessons of Mayflower took.

The EPA's proposed expansion of the 'waters of the United States' would subject Arkansans, especially farmers and ranchers, to costly and overly burdensome federal regulations, harm our agriculture industry that is vital to our state's economy and replace state and locally based conservation efforts with a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach. Our vote today stops this massive government overreach in its tracks and requires federal agencies to consult with states and local governments when proposing these regulatory measures on local waters."

I think the definition of "costly and overly burdensome federal regulations" in our present context is directly proportional to how greasy a lack of effective federal regulations made your constituents. And does Tim Griffin love him some death funnel? You bet he does.

Congressman Griffin is sponsoring the bill to force the Obama Administration to approve the XL Pipeline without the environmental review now required by law. What's odd is that Griffin represents Arkansas, a state with no stake in the Pipeline. [Editor's note: There IS the tube plant in Little Rock, but its work on that project is complete except for shipment.]But the Kochs have a stake in Griffin. In his maiden run for Congress, Griffin was elected with an eye-popping $167,000 donation from the Kochs. For $167,000, any congressman will wash your car — with their tongue. For the Kochs, $167K is peanuts. Their political action operation, Americans for Prosperity, built a quarter billion dollar fund this past year, a sum never seen even in the US politics cash swamp.

And there are both unanswered questions, dancing in a graceful gavotte to keep the piece from a real conclusion. TBOTP's piece has a serious "both sides do it" element running through it. It engages one critic from each party -- Fred Upton is the Republican and Peter DeFazio is the Democrat -- and it is tough on the current administration for neglecting the PHMSA. (There hasn't even been a permanent director since October. Stop me if you've heard that one before.) But the fact remains that there is not a single Republican presidential candidate who says anything about federal regulations except what a job-killer they are. There is not a single Republican politician who has stood up in any substantial way against the deregulatory frenzy that has overtaken the party over the past 35 years, and against the government-is-the-problem philosophy from which it emerged when Saint Ronnie began the process of rolling back the stone from the tomb of the Mellons and the Carnegies. Support for the Keystone XL death funnel is as rigid a litmus test within the party as anything is.

In 2013, the folks at InsideClimate won a Pulitzer for their investigation of the Enbridge spill that TBOTP mentions. And one of the things they discovered was that the approach of the two parties on the issue of regulating pipelines tracked perfectly with what you might have expected.

President Barack Obama's 2013 budget would increase funding for the agency. Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget does not specify how much PHMSA should receive, but it recommended slashing funding for the Department of Transportation, which encompasses PHMSA.

The Democratic party has been feckless and timid on this subject. The Republicans, on the other hand, especially now that the Supreme Court has legitimized influence peddling on a grand scale, have been little more than vandals. That makes a difference, or ought to, anyway.