Guymon, OK | Aaron SEIA - 4/29/2012 14:11
I'm curious, there have been 2 of these tiling machine vs gas pipe things in the last week. Are people not calling One Call, are they not paying attention to the makers in the fence lines? Just don't see how a professional could not have a good idea where a gas line is and miss it. Heck, when I called in my septic dig, the gas company sent someone out even though I knew the line was several hundred yards into the field.
AaronSEIA
You might be surprised how many pipelines aren't marked correctly, run in really weird directions between markers, or don't have any sort of tracer wire on them. Around here, a guy marking pipelines might just have a 30 year old map and dead reckoning to go by. When we were running gas line last year we hit a saltwater line that was 15 feet from where it was supposed to be, and an abandoned 4in gas line that nobody knew about (kind of a scary moment). At the same location, the guy from the oil company who marked lines for us lost an active 4in gas line right in the area where we needed to dig - turned out the old steel line had rusted out in that spot and was repaired with plastic, but a tracer wire was never put around the plastic.
I don't know the details of the incidents in question, just saying that sometimes not everything is what it seems. |
Pipeline explosion pictures
