PIPE SAFETY ON THE LINE AFTER PETROLEUM SPILL

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993                   TAG: 9304120109
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: FAIRFAX                                LENGTH: Medium
PIPE SAFETY ON THE LINE AFTER PETROLEUM SPILL
Every day about 840 million gallons of petroleum course through the nation's approximately 210,000 miles of underground pipelines, passing near homes, schools, forests and rivers.
The lines carry oil for heating homes, fuel for cars and trucks and airplanes. In much of the country, including Virginia and most of the Northeast, pipelines carry most of the oil used in daily life.
The pipeline that ruptured in Fairfax County two weeks ago, sending more than 400,000 gallons of fuel spewing onto the ground and into a tributary of the Potomac River, has renewed interest in pipeline safety.
Critics claim pipeline companies do too little to ensure that the pipes, many of them old, are safe from rupture or leaks.
Much of the safety monitoring is done by the pipeline companies themselves, and outside enforcement has been lax, those critics say.
The oil industry contends pipelines are the safest and most efficient way to deliver vital products.
"It is safer because the flow of the product is closely controlled in the pipeline, with valves and shutoffs. It is certainly under greater control than when the product goes out on highways and waterways where there is greater risk of accident," said Mike Ward, executive director of the Virginia Petroleum Council.
Oil companies own pipelines through consortia like Colonial Pipeline Co., operator of the 36-inch pipe that ruptured in Fairfax. Before the accident, the line carried 1.9 million gallons of fuel daily from refineries in Texas to tank farms and other sites along the East Coast.
Between 1980 and 1989, more than 20 million gallons of oil spilled from pipelines nationwide, according to a 1991 General Accounting Office study.
"That's twice as much as leaked from the Exxon Valdez" tanker accident in 1989, said Michael Hausfeld, a lawyer for homeowners affected by the latest spill and an oil industry critic.
Between 1982 and 1992, Colonial Pipeline reported 25 spills totaling about 1 million gallons in Virginia, Hausfeld said.
"And how much did we transport in that same period of time?" said Colonial spokesman Noel Griese. "We transport 77 million gallons a day" nationwide.
When gallons spilled are measured against gallons transported, pipelines far outperform railroads, trucks or ships, Griese said.
While regrettable, leaks are "the tradeoff you make when you have a petroleum-based economy," Griese said. "You are dealing with machines, and there is no machine that is immune to failure."
Colonial is the largest pipeline operator in the world and one of two operating in Virginia. The company operates a pipeline that supplies tank farms at Montvale in Bedford County.
The GAO, Congress' investigative arm, looked only at spills from ruptures and leaky valves, but other oil likely seeped from small cracks in the pipes.
"We really don't know how much leaks out, but we know it can threaten drinking water supplies," said Kathleen Sheridan, leader of a citizens group in Fairfax pushing to close a leaky oil tank farm.
The tank farm a few miles from the site of the Colonial spill has leaked more than 200,000 gallons of oil into a suburban neighborhood.
"This is occurring in Northern Virginia with unacceptable frequency. We have two major contaminated sites in Fairfax County alone," Sheridan said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB