Multiple gas explosions and fires in Massachusetts
cnn.com
cnn.com
They have a good "mutual aid" system here and fire apparatus from the neighboring communities including New Hampshire and all over the Boston area eventually flooded in to these three cities (Lawrence, Andover, North Andover) to help.
Someone mentioned there have been incidents like this before in Lexington, Mass. The news also mentioned another incident in Danvers more than 10 years ago but that wasn't natural gas, it was improperly stored chemicals: http://archive.boston.com/news/specials/local/danvers_explos...
ETA: An 18 year old died - he was sitting in a car in a driveway next to the house that exploded, and a chimney fell on the vehicle.
We drove north to New Hampshire on instinct as soon as we had a sense of what was happening (about an hour before the formal evacuation), and saw police and firetrucks heading south the entire way. After dinner, on our way back south (not home, but to another place to stay tonight), all the highway exits in the affected areas were closed, with police at each exit offering guidance to drivers who weren't sure what to do or where to go.
The affected communities are suburban -- not in the boonies, but not urban either, and definitely not used to having to respond so urgently to a widespread problem like this. They appear to have been very well trained and ready for it.
No. They are very much are not. Massachusetts people are busybodies compared to people farther north. They very much care about things that others do that don't effect them. It's been this way since Boston was founded in the 1600s and it's deeply ingrained in the culture. I didn't notice it until I lived in northern New England for awhile.
Nobody will talk to you on the subway. Everybody will be very interested on whether your replacement garage door "fits the character of the neighborhood" though. If your kid gets off the bus and lets themselves into the house before you show up from work you are going to get really familiar with the local cops.
My favorite two anecdotes:
I once drove ~1/2mi home after getting a flat (in the tires' defense, it was older than me), mid-morning on a weekday. Less than 5min later, while I was in the middle of "screw these used pieces of shit, I'm ordering all new Firestones on Amazon" the cops, knocked on my door. Turns out someone had followed me home and then called me in to the cops as a possible drunk driver, on a weekday morning. And the cops were happy to oblige. They had no problem showing up and playing the questions game with me over a call they would have ignored in NH or ME.
Back when I was in middle school (decades ago) my parents got lectured by the school about how they were raising me because I kept getting in trouble for using pads of sticky notes to make short animations of car crashes, explosions, and other typical action movie stuff.
If those aren't hallmarks of a society that think's it's perfectly fine to get unnecessarily involved in someone else's problems then I don't know what is.
You have to admit they were on to something though, here you are writing stuff on a forum for scary hackers.
Would it even be able to mitigate something like this?
Curious..
Yes, but this idea of "right" and insulation or exemption from problems is derived from a protestant belief system which is a major part of American culture.
Although the concept can be helpful in navigating life, it is totally unrelated to reality.
I think recognizing how this notion came to be can help with the cognitive dissonance and move you closer to acceptance.
Yes, who could forget that famous sermon by Luther? I don't know how you figure.
At some point I saw a map of all of those mini-leaks which are known and not worth fixing and sure enough one is right in front of my house
That is the odourant, which fortunately alerts you of its presence and concentration. Pure methane is odourless.
National Grid would come by every few months, stick a probe in the ground, and declare it not worth fixing despite our repeated calls.
To me that just sounds like a huge WTF!?!? If it was lit, would they just come and extinguish it and then leave?
Regardless, I'd consider it a massive hazard to have clouds of flammable gas just lingering everywhere.
Im surprised no politician has pushed to get it fixed since climate change is something people care about in the area and methane is much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide
The dark ages are constantly there, just waiting to return.
I think one of the compounds is that which is used in stinkbombs.
PS: Are stinkbombs still a thing in schools? Or has zero-tolerance made that a capital crime too?
Off topic, but so d.mn right/funny :-)
Edit: But I don't believe this story is about National Grid.
That is correct - the company that owns the infrastructure where things went horribly wrong is Columbia Gas of Massachusetts, which is owned by NISource (NYSE:NI), which is based in Indiana.
Iirc we recently sold the gas part of the national grid to a Chinese company.
Send a registered snail mail describing the leak in your neighborhood to the agent, copy corporate counsel and at least one local news organization. Major bonus points if you find and copy the gas company's insurance carrier. Emphasize the potential for destruction of property and death of innocents - and the gas company's potential liability. Raise the spectre of California's PG&E and San Bruno.
Management and its insurers care deeply about liability. Old-fashioned paper trails can be surprisingly effective.
That's pretty impressively cynical.
https://www.google.com/search?biw=1920&bih=953&tbs=cdr%3A1%2...
Is this normal for other gas utilities?
I've never heard of "mini gas leaks" that are supposed to be fine until I've seen this thread. Every gas leak that's reported here must be fixed. Gas-related explosions still happen, I'd say it's 50:50 people messing with gas piping and people attempting suicide.
It'd be interesting to see whether there's a correlation between explosion and leak location.
Github: https://github.com/RogerTangos/LostLeaks/tree/master/data
Overview (just for the Boston Area. I didn't do the analysis for Columbia gas.) http://lostleaks.csail.mit.edu
I'm happy to lend a hand for the Columbia 2016-17, and 2017-18 data if others want to join in.
Some news sites would probably interested in this website/project at the moment...
Both that house and the one I own now are over 100 years old. The water, sewer, and gas lines are, AFAIK, original.
http://www.hertsmemories.org.uk/content/herts-history/towns-...
That was human error rather than failing infrastructure.
My initial thought in this case, before hearing about the underinvestment by the utility company, was SCADA kit tampering/hacking. Running the pressure slightly high would be a very similar approach to the spinning of centrifuges at slightly over speed - not immediately detectable but with serious consequences. Judging by the comments on this thread it looks more like ineptitude/negligence by the utility.
https://dailycollegian.com/2005/11/explosion-destroys-lexing...
https://www.firehouse.com/photo-story/article/10550631/gas-e...
(1982) A state of emergency was in effect today after 28 homes and businesses burst into flames within seconds when the pressure in a natural gas line was kicked up accidentally, causing water heaters and furnaces to spit fire like "blowtorches."
http://www.gendisasters.com/missouri/18442/centralia-mo-natu...
Fortunately I didn’t get hit by any shrapnel. And I got a new oven out of it, which was nice. But now I’m afraid of both cooking methods.
Kind of like how the UK peaked around the turn of the century and has been a net importer for more than a decade, but delayed by maybe 15 years.
In this line of business (IT) its all about scaling. The economic models around natgas are hilarious in that nobody scales beyond one, at least in public. So every country on the planet has a natgas economic model where on a scale factor of one, the permanent transition from exporter to importer is "no biggie" because there's an infinite supply of infinite cheap commodity natgas from world trade, so we'll just have some ... permanent inflation from printing money to import all that natgas. That economic model sounds really good scaled to one country, but doesn't work well when scaled to "pretty much every country on the planet at the same time and the global cheap commodity natgas market disappears".
There's probably a lot of startup opportunity in "residential natgas disappears".
Discoveries peaked in the 70s, normal production peaked a decade ago, strange fracking experiments to squeeze the last blood from the rocks is peaking "around now ish".
Natgas is vastly more useful to make plastics and fertilizer than to run my clothes dryer, and global demand is completely unconstrained, and economic conditions such as income inequality, demographic changes, etc are only getting worse, so its not controversial at all to claim in a couple decades your average house will not have natgas service.
Generally its cheaper to install insulation and better windows than to install more electrical generating capacity. Probably cheaper to install insulation and a heat recovery ventilator than to install natgas fuel-cell cogeneration plants in each basement or triple the number of nuclear reactors.
I would imagine this ties into long term planning such as chopping maintenance budgets. If buried gas lines can't be maintained to any standard other than lasting the next 80 years at great expense, and corporate strategy indicates not enough end user consumers will be able to pay $2000/month inflation adjusted to heat their house in twenty years, then just pencil whip the maintenance until the service shuts down.
You can see the future of residential natgas in the past of dairy milk delivery, ice block delivery, to some extent postal service, land line phones, and cable TV. You can expect a lot of gas-lighting (oh the pun) about how the replacement services are so much better (solar heating, insulation, etc)
Water heaters too, electrics have improved and the operating cost difference is really not that big. Electric water heaters might also be extremely valuable for demand response.
When it comes to space heating in cold climates though, I don't really know what replaces natural gas. Probably air source heat pumps, but they are still maturing.
When it's -6 degrees outside and you have hot water, heat, and a fireplace that are all still working you'll get it real quick.
A furnace does require a generator to run the blower, but it can be a pretty small one and it sips fuel.
I'm sure it's a different story in some parts of the world, of course.
Natural gas is 7% of the total energy consumption here (https://www.stat.fi/til/ehk/2018/01/ehk_2018_01_2018-06-27_t...).
There are 30.000 homes that have gas connection for cooking, but that is a small fraction of the ~2.700.000 households in Finland ( https://www.gasum.com/en/About-gas/natural-gas-and-lng/Use-o...).
Gas is used for heating, but it is mostly via CHP (Combined Heating and Power) plants that heat water in a district heating network ( https://energia.fi/en/energy_sector_in_finland/energy_produc... , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating ).
For single detached houses, for new houses the most common main heat sources are ground heat (52%) and air heat pumps (18%). with other options being electricity (8%), district heating (9%), water heat pumps (8%) and wood (5%) (Finnish: https://www.suomirakentaa.fi/omakotirakentaja/laemmitys/laem...).
As for existing single detached houses, the most common sources are 44% electricity, 21% wood, 16% oil (Finnish: http://www.stat.fi/tietotrendit/artikkelit/2018/uusiutuva-en...) .
Energy consumption in households by energy source, type of use, type of building, GWh: https://www.stat.fi/til/asen/2016/asen_2016_2017-11-17_tau_0...
Yet mention that we could have solar panels and batteries for local storage and people will say "we can't have huge banks of batteries in our houses, think of the fire risk!"
Seems like some of the very people affected have embraced solar power.
Here in the developing country where I live the locals think Americans are insane for doing this. When I first moved here I thought they were backward because there is no gas piped around. It's all portable refillable tanks that you buy at the corner shop and hook up to your stove. Seems like a recipe for disaster, right? Well yes, there are accidents and an explosion now and then. But it's limited to a single house in most cases. They don't have whole neighborhoods erupting due to failing infrastructure. So maybe I'm changing my mind and being less developed has some very real advantages.
But these types of explosions are extremely rare, and most likely you'll find more accidents in less developed countries from people connecting the tanks incorrectly than you'll find from instances in the US, UK, or other countries of massive accidents like this one.
The system should have safety overpressure relief valves, but obviously something went wrong.
It does, but those will vent to the atmosphere, if there is enough overpressure and it lasts for long enough the amount of gas released would be considerable.
The whole thing sounds as if that is what happened, an overpressure situation lasting longer than a few moments allowed weak spots in lines and homes to fail leading to fires and explosions.
Imagine a tube that should be at 1.2 atm, and a feeder line that is at 5 atm. The equipment and the lines on the far side of the regulator may be able to deal with 3 but no more than that. If all the consumers are off and you do not bleed excess gas from the bypass leakage into the atmosphere the pressure on the far side will slowly increase until it is 5 atm, the pressure of the feeder line (no seal is perfect). So you need some way to get rid of that, and normally that is what the vent does, so it will allow miniscule amounts of gas to pass out in order to not let the far side go overpressure.
But if the feederline suddenly jumps to 10 atm, ruptures the seal or if the regulator sticks 'open' when that spike happens then the only thing that stops your internal line to go to that pressure is the bleeder (and in extreme cases, a burst plate that will break). This would allow a lot of gas to be released.
This is also why in some countries regulators are installed outside of the house rather than inside.
Another avenue for gas to escape if the seal breaks is the atmospheric port that allows the pressure of the chamber on the atmospheric side to be the same as ambient, in a sealed housing that would not be the case. Gas pressure regulation is not just about reduction, it is also to output a fixed delta relative to ambient otherwise your stove would make much larger flames if the atmospheric pressure was low!
Those regulators are works of art, totally passive and yet with a whole raft of features.
In the early days they billed on the number of gas jets for illumination but once gas stoves and furnaces became a thing they needed some way to measure, and there's some weird technology out there involving something like an archimedes screw sitting in a couple inches of anti-freeze driving low friction clockwork. Now a days its probably optical sensors instead of clockwork but whatever.
Two engineering topics are being missed; flow rate thru an orifice is strongly non-linear, and there are no hermetically sealed large scale transport technologies. Its staggeringly impressive that like 99% of electricity pumped into the grid makes it out the other end. Its not practical from an engineering standpoint to operate a leak free material transport pipeline. There's plenty of engineering guidelines such that a leak rate ten times lower than could theoretically cause an explosion is quite acceptable, until some idiot accidentally applies a 10x overpressure forcing open orifices permanently and increasing the leakage flow rate 200x and then kaboom.
Its kind of like automobile gas stations... it would be nice to never have a leak and LARP that we'll be very serious and studious about never having a petroleum leak, but that mindset leads to design and operations decisions which become environmental disasters when the inevitable happens. Better to build everything with the assumption the underground tank will leak one liter per month than to plan the leak rate will be zero. Also no level of idiot proofing is perfect; that leak-tolerant station design will still fail if some truck driver pumps 2000 gallons into a 1000 gallon tank while not paying attention.
There's also safety tolerance / clickbait issues. Natgas averages about ten customers dead per year in the USA. Its very difficult to get stats for in-house mis-adventure but it seems about three hundred die per year from in-home electrocution, so its kinda a rounding error. Food related illness (food poisoning leading to dehydration leading to death) kills about 5000 per year in the usa per google (which seems high?) so you're about 30 times more likely to electrocute yourself at home than die in a natgas explosion, and 500 times more likely to be killed by whats in your cooking pot than whats heating your cooking pot. Given that, more investment to prevent natgas deaths would likely result in more deaths from other causes; taking money away from "stop drinking corn syrup" or "cook meat to 165F" will kill more people than a 10% improvement in long term natgas death stats would save.
It seems one solution might be to have a small constantly-burning flame (the other posts here that say small gas leaks are basically being ignored suggest that it wouldn't really cost much more) at the relief valve exits, so that if they vent, the excess gas just gets burnt. Obviously the relief valve exits should be located away from flammables, and preferably visible so that extended overpressure events are immediately noticeable from the flames coming out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_flare
The goal is to not silently create an explosive mixture, but to burn vented gas to make it harmless and create a visible indicator of extended venting.
When the amounts are larger that is exactly how it is done. But for trace amounts the mixture would not reach a concentration level where it is combustible and then you need a whole setup around that to batch it to the point where it is.
Hard to do that passively, also, you could no longer do that indoors.
The idea is that an increase in pressure relative to ambient will cause a needle (low flow) or disc (high flow) valve to open or close, pressure in the pipe higher than the desired delta will cause the valve to close and vice-versa.
The venting is a safety measure to protect downstream equipment in case of regulator failure (for instance, if it seizes too far open, or the seals are porous and the consumers are all not using gas which would slowly cause the pressure in the house side to rise to the same pressure as the feeder line), and normally this would be to let little bits of gas escape, but if the line pressure were high enough it would allow a constant stream of gas to escape from regulators that were 'borderline' or seized up. It could also cause the membrane under the spring to break, and that would let even more gas out through the seal between the tap stem and the regulator housing, and any consumers that were 'on' at the time would have to deal with the overpressure directly which they would not be designed for. They can handle a bit of overpressure but not for ever and not beyond certain set limits. Especially aluminum burner housings would simply burn up after some time.
In some lines there are burst plates as the final safety, those really should never go but when they do it is definitely a spectacle if there is an ignition source nearby. A burst place is a purposefully weakened structure that is bolted (with a seal) on top of a gasline so that when the pressure increases above the burst plate's rating the plate will rupture. This does not self reset for obvious reasons and will need an on-site technician to repair and would come with a serious investigation into what went wrong upstream.
There is also the opposite device, an emergency shutdown valve that automatically closes when the flow gets either too high or goes negative. The former to ensure that a ruptured pipe will not vent enormous quantities of explosive gas in to the atmosphere, the latter to avoid having an air/gas mixture in the lines.
Gas infrastructure is quite interesting, and very expensive to install and maintain.
Our neighborhood was built in 1950. This system upgrade included replacing all the mains in the road as well.
A site representing the union states that those locked out "do the critical work of maintaining natural gas lines for homes, schools, and businesses across Massachusetts"[1]
Unsure if this is related to the current incident & Columbia Gas
edit: Press conferences seem to indicate that Columbia Gas is responsible for this region and not National Grid. Seems Unrelated
[0]: http://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2018/08/13/national-grid-lock...
[1]: https://www.usw.org/act/campaigns/lockout-at-national-grid/r...
If you think about it: highly flammable/explosive substance transported under high pressure 24/7 in decades-old infrastructure -- it's amazing there hasn't been more accidents.
We share a border with a state that prides itself on not over-regulating things and their houses aren't blowing up.
This is just the product of good, old fashioned incompetence and apathy from top to bottom.
For example, I have a giant gas meter outside my home. How come it can't turn the gas off when the line is over pressure? Massachusetts state law requires that the gas company change it every few years. (I'm a MA resident)
My breaker box will turn off if there is a fault.
- an overpressure situation is specifically trying to blow through whatever "off" means (e.g. a ball valve or whatever the valves are). If the pressure rises too much, that valve is going to fail. That's true of circuit breakers too, but the "overvoltage fault voltage" of a circuit breaker is likely going to be way way way higher than anything you could reasonably expect from the grid, although lightning could probably flash over it.
- Your breaker box will turn off during certain forms of fault, but not all. A line overvoltage probably wouldn't trip a breaker until the line voltage gets high enough to cause a fault in some piece of equipment connected downstream of the breaker (e.g. it blows up a switching power supply in your house and that fault current trips the breaker)
- In the gas overpressure case, if all of the houses had gas meters that automatically turned off... the pressure in the community gas line would rise higher and higher. This is going to sound a bit cold, but it's likely better to have some houses blow up due to overpressure than to have a gas main explode after all of the houses have already shut off the gas.
Bad situation all around :(. While acknowledging that I'm not a Mech E, my guess would be that the best solution would be to have periodically-placed blow-off valves on the gas main that could flare the gas if there were an overpressure situation. You don't really want to just release it, because then you've got a cloud of gas floating around that could get ignited by... whatever random ignition source.
My gas meter is already outside the house, more than 30 feet away from anything flammable. In an emergency overpressure like this, shouldn't I be able to pull some sort of emergency lever to vent the gas outside.
Yeah, that gas is flammable, which is risky. But that has to be less risky than just sitting around waiting for my house to blow up, which seems to be my only option today.
That way you're at least not going to have the inside of your house fill with gas.
The trick with an overpressure gas main is that pulling that lever isn't going to be a "gas vents off for a few seconds and then things are good again" event. You won't be just reducing the pressure for your house, you'll be reducing the pressure for your entire neighbourhood, and there's going to be a pretty significant amount of gas that needs to vent.
Also, I'm not sure if this is the case with methane, but propane has a really fun property... Going from compressed/liquified propane to gas propane has a high enough latent heat of vaporization that it can cool the surrounding liquid enough to freeze it (!!!). There was a court case around here a few years ago with a propane truck that blew a valve and started venting propane to the atmosphere. The liquid->gas transition cooled off the valve so much that a solid propane plug formed and stopped the leak (-188 degC!). Temporarily, of course... the plug eventually thawed, the gas continued escaping, and things got bad again. Having devices that could experience similar behaviour installed at peoples' homes seems pretty dangerous to me.
It's all a shitty situation. Really, this is on the gas company. Their pumps should have never gotten the lines pressurized like this, and they should have had mechanisms in place to vent it in a controlled and safe fashion.
If this was infallible there wouldn't be a market for surge protectors
What exactly went wrong here is still unknown but the smart money is on an uncontained overpressure and a failure of one or more safeties. All it takes i the right set of circumstances. For instance: a very short pulse of very high pressure followed by a lower pressure not high enough to cause venting to occur. That would do nicely: every membrane in the line that was at or near the end of their service life would break causing high pressure to end up on the low pressure side but it would not cause the main safeties to trip.
Keep in mind that all this stuff is passive, mostly mechanical and in many cases decades old.
Something similar can happen to circuit breakers: there is an effect that causes the breaker to weld itself into position rather than to break the circuit, and there are plenty of examples of the breakers themselves catching fire due to high resistance between the breaker contacts. Then there is lightning, which can zap your house to the point that your electronics gear is nicely plated on the inside of empty casings and the breakers are all still sitting there as if everything is fine.
It is super hard to create a safety system that will always work under every circumstance, especially if you want to do this maintenance free. More so, if you did not design it maintenance free but someone decided to skip on the maintenance.
I live in a city that has three major rivers in it, and more bridges than any other[3]. Things like these give me the willies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-5_Skagit_River_Bridge_collap...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_85_bridge_collapse
Can only hope the damage is contained quick.
https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/blowing-smoke/Content?...
A gas explosion (claimed to be among the biggest non-nuclear explosions) was caused by the CIA hacking a soviet pipeline: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/...
No idea what caused today's explosion, but the USA is clearly not without enemies and vulnerabilities in its own infrastructure.
Yet its also too destructive and attention seeking to be a plausible threat or sending a message; if outsiders messed with the SCADA to do this, fifteen minutes later all the passwords would be changed and sites physically locked down, such that a threat to do something more destructive next time (or else..) such as flicking the gas supply off for a couple minutes would be a non-starter. You have to look at it militarily like a stealth attack; giving away your position is not a wise first move if your whole strategy is stealth. You get one shot and this would be an intentional miss, so ...
This would also imply its not an inside job; an insider would know that in my state (admittedly not MA, thankfully) an interruption in pressure requires an attempt at physical access by a rep with a leak sensor to verify pilot light and pilot light safety interlock for EVERY point of use and/or door tag notification warnings. Its happened to me a couple of times for some street work replacing pipes and replacement of my old meter. Its kind of an expensive labor job, a wealth transfer from the company to the union. The fact this didn't happen kind of exonerates the union.
So rule out outsiders and insiders. A nutjob would probably drive a truck into an above ground facility, or frankly, just drive into people, so its probably not a nut. Not many options left. Space aliens did it accidentally? Maybe they closed down that solar observatory in NM because the space aliens are coming to mess with our delicious natgas.
Your comment seems to be implying that there is some sort of evidence of hacking here, which, unless I'm missing something, does not seem to be the case.
Let’s put it this way: it wouldn’t surprise me, especially in Lawrence, if some of the gas mains were still made out of wood. Before you scoff, NYC replaced the last wood gas main that they knew of 25 years ago, but they still occasionally find wooden pipe in their systems.
The best way I’ve heard the gas infrastructure described is “antiquated ... if it was aged, it could be updated and replaced, but it’s so antiquated all that can be done is patchwork because there’s no time to do anything but.”
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/sep...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_regulator
...and the cause may be as simple as the regulator valve sticking open for some reason.
Unlikely.
> but it's likely that gas main pressure is controlled by a computer.
But the failsafes are not. Overpressure is something the system is designed to handle, and those gas substations that you see every now and then in fields are the places where the overpressure regulation devices are located, and they are purely mechanical.
> It'd be shocking if a software failure could cause dozens of fires.
It would be, but this isn't that. The actuators on these systems are made with the express purpose that line fluctuations will always be slow enough to catch up with. But if a regulator fails in a bad way that might cause a prolonged overpressure with the initial change arriving as a spike, which may expose further weaknesses downstream.
So the signature of an upstream regulator failure (a big one, and a sudden one too), is fairly consistent with what you are seeing here. The software actuators would not cause a pressure rise fast enough for that initial spike and the limit settings on those actuators (which are mechanical) would not allow those actuators to move beyond certain minimum and maximum set points for each line that they service.
The people that designed these systems were anything but stupid and it is failsafes layered on more failsafes, the big killer for systems like this is a very simple one: back maintenance.