FIRESTONE — Thirty months after the explosion that blew up their home and killed her husband and brother, Erin Martinez and her shaken children are uprooting a second time, still trying to settle away from underground oil and gas pipelines.
Martinez had done about all a Colorado resident can do, in buying their first replacement home, to find out whether fossil-fuel lines remained in the ground — checking with the home seller, the builder, town planners and the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She received assurances the closest old well was a mile away.
But a few months later, she and the kids saw white Anadarko Petroleum trucks in an adjacent field. That’s the same company that owned the well hooked to an uncapped 1-inch pipeline that leaked methane into their old home, leading to the April 17, 2017, blast that killed Mark Martinez and Joey Irwin, and left her badly burned.
Anadarko crews dug closer and closer, eventually exposing an abandoned oil well buried at their fenceline, shattering her children’s trust.
“Very upsetting,” Martinez said in a recent interview, the day before she underwent her 27th surgery. “It is insane. We have all these lines running through the ground that are carrying these dangerous energy things. And we don’t even know where they all are.”
Colorado leaders promised in 2017 that they’d do all they could to make sure such a tragedy never happens again. They pledged comprehensive public pipeline maps and better inspections to detect leaks.
But that still hasn’t been done — due to the difficulty of locating lines and a failure of government agencies to take charge. Only now, ahead of a Halloween deadline, are state officials asking companies to provide partial data on a subset of existing lines.
A widening underground web of pipelines in Colorado and across the nation spans millions of miles and remains partially unmapped, unregulated and uninspected. These pipelines carry fossil fuels out of sight and largely out of mind, snaking beneath homes and buildings to enable the consumption of oil and gas.
Federal government and industry officials contend pipelines are less risky and harmful than the alternatives of moving oil and gas in tanker trucks on public roads or by train.
“Safety is the industry’s top priority,” said Lynn Granger, director of the Colorado Petroleum Council, run by the American Petroleum Institute.
Yet pipelines still fail, sometimes causing catastrophic harm, and oil and gas companies are resisting stricter controls. Problems along the larger pipelines in Colorado for which the federal government keeps records are reported at least once a month, an investigation by The Denver Post found. Colorado health officials say air pollution leaking from pipelines worsens climate warming. And state data shows pipelines as a source of toxic spills.
The uncertainty about where lines are located has complicated efforts to create rules, let alone ensure inspections. Colorado officials estimated that a broad unregulated class of pipelines called “gathering lines” in the state spans tens of thousands of miles, but couldn’t give a more precise number because they lack location information from companies, which still aren’t required to provide it.
State officials have asked companies only to give start-point and end-point coordinates for the smaller class of pipelines that industry officials and state regulators call “flowlines.” These connect wells to surrounding equipment. (The data that companies have submitted, ahead of Thursday’s deadline, indicates flowlines span at least 6,522 miles, an oil and gas commission spokeswoman said.)
Among the Post’s other findings:
— Along the bigger interstate lines in Colorado, federal data shows 35 “accidents” and “incidents” since early 2017. Those resulted from a variety of problems including leaky valves, ruptured seals and a farmer plowing too close. State records on oil and gas facilities along pipelines reveal multiple fires and explosions since April 2017. And pipeline companies in Colorado haven’t been required to report all incidents.
— Nationwide, 438,000 miles of the 2.9 million miles of underground oil and gas pipelines are not regulated, according to calculations by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation.
— The number of serious pipeline incidents reported in the U.S. averages 32 a year, causing an average of 12 deaths and 66 injuries, a 2019 Congressional Research Service study found. As pipelines deteriorate, the number of serious incidents increased to 40 in 2018.
— For the pipelines that federal authorities oversee, 20 inspectors are tasked with covering Colorado and 11 other western states. And when the inspectors try to shut down pipelines where they suspect corrosion, they say they face resistance.
— Deficient pipelines cause roughly 10% of the toxic spills that contaminate Colorado soil, water and air, the state’s engineering integrity supervisor Mark Schlagenhauf told The Post.
Colorado’s lag in dealing with pipeline safety and environmental harm has compelled blast survivor Martinez — forced by her injuries to retire from her work as a high school chemistry teacher — to take on this matter as a family mission. Martinez now is advocating for comprehensive public mapping of all underground lines, frequent inspections including pressure tests before restarting abandoned lines, and a rule that companies must remove their old wells and lines.
“I don’t see why this industry can leave their trash in the ground. Flowlines that are abandoned need to be removed,” she said. “It is your right to know what is under your house. And what is under the school where you are sending your kids?”
American roulette
The risks for Americans are rising, especially along Colorado’s Front Range and other areas where communities are expanding onto once-rural land, said Carl Weimer, director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit watchdog organization formed as part of a criminal plea deal after a 1999 explosion in Bellingham, Wash., killed three boys who were playing in a park and wiped out a two-mile stretch of Whatcom Creek.
“We’re playing roulette as a nation right now,” Weimer said. “We’re relying on an industry that is trying to make a fast buck to do the right things. It works for some operators. For others, it does not.”
Fossil-fuel pipeline problems have emerged as particularly vexing along the Front Range because population growth and a development boom are bringing tens of thousands more people to land where energy companies simultaneously are expanding their extraction of oil and gas.
The industry operates more than 53,000 oil and gas wells statewide. Underground pipelines also are associated with an estimated 40,000 inactive, abandoned and “temporarily abandoned” wells. More than 120,000 pipeline segments are in the ground within 1,000 feet of homes, according to information companies submitted to state authorities following the Firestone explosion.
Yet Colorado does not require companies that own pipelines to provide public maps. And Colorado does not enforce pipeline construction standards or require regular high-pressure tests of underground lines, relying on companies to ensure safety. State agencies generally don’t send inspectors to monitor corrosion, look for leaks and measure emissions.
Elsewhere, Texas officials have been considering regulation of the gathering lines that collect fossil fuels from initial storage near oilfields and carry them toward larger interstate transmission lines. They’ve been spurred by an August 2018 explosion that destroyed a home, killing a 3-year-old girl and burning her parents. Ohio officials have expanded their regulatory authority over gathering lines.
A University of Colorado School of Public Health analysis of state records found that companies reported 116 fires and explosions at oil and gas facilities between 2006 and 2015. However, fires, explosions, leaks and other problems may happen more frequently, researchers concluded, because Colorado has a relatively lenient self-reporting system, unlike states such as Utah that mandate reporting of every fire and explosion.
Colorado requires self-reporting to the director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission only of fires, explosions and detonations that result in harm to a member of the general public that requires medical treatment and/or caused damage to equipment or a well site that companies deem significant.
Colorado records show that, in the eight months after the Firestone explosion, at least a dozen explosions and fires occurred at oil and gas industry facilities including pipelines. Two of those explosions killed workers.
Expansion of underground network
The oil and gas industry is preparing to construct many more underground pipelines — despite growing demands, buttressed by a scientific consensus, for a faster shift off fossil fuels in order to save humans and other species from potentially catastrophic warming.
U.S. industry leaders are projecting that current production of about 14 million barrels of oil per day will increase to nearly 20 million barrels per day by 2035, according to a 2018 study by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, an industry organization that lobbies for pipelines. “This growing supply results in the need for new pipeline transport and oil handling capability,” the study’s authors wrote.
Fossil-fuel companies will spend an average of $14.7 billion a year until 2035 installing new pipelines, the study found. Across the United States and Canada, companies will construct 7,720 miles of gathering lines each year, adding nearly 140,000 miles by 2035. And the study found companies will construct another 41,000 miles of oil and natural gas transmission pipelines.
Roughly 64% of the new gathering lines will carry gas, with the remainder moving oil, it found. Significant oil still is stored in tanks near wellheads and transported by truck. Gathering lines generally are 8 inches in diameter, with some as large as 30 inches. Modern multi-well industrial pads of the sort companies are installing along the Front Range extract greater volumes of oil, requiring larger underground lines near people.
Colorado officials are wrestling with how best to handle the widening underground web of oil and gas pipelines.
“The use of pipelines is an important, positive benefit, overall, for the state,” Jeff Robbins, director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, said in a recent interview. “What is important is that we know where the pipelines are.”
But commission officials preparing for another round of “rulemaking” in late November are looking only at some of the underground pipelines, the flowlines that run near well pads connecting production facilities to nearby processing equipment and storage tanks.
Two years ago, after the Firestone explosion, former Gov. John Hickenlooper ordered companies to identify and test their pipelines within 1,000 feet of homes. Companies reported conducting integrity tests on 120,815 pipeline segments and finding 428 that failed — which then were repaired.
The state’s oil and gas commission regulators in 2018 updated flowline rules. Companies now must inform state officials where new flowlines are installed. Commissioners set the Thursday deadline for companies to provide information on old flowlines they know about. Major leaks must be reported within 24 hours. And if companies discover more old flowlines in the future, they’re supposed to notify state regulators using forms available on a state website.
Those updated rules adopted under Gov. Hickenlooper “certainly upped the ante in terms of our regulation of flowlines,” said Robbins, who previously represented local governments and was appointed by Gov. Jared Polis, who has urged greater caution in conducting oil and gas industry operations near people.
Robbins has directed his staff to consider whether start-point and end-point data for tracking underground pipelines is sufficient. Colorado could push for maps that show “the actual location of flowlines,” he said.
Proposed new rules would require mapping of flowlines and public access to those maps via a state government website. These rules also would set standards for preventing corrosion and making repairs, require state review of the frequency of pipeline integrity tests and how best to detect leaks, and better define how companies respond to problems.
In April, Colorado lawmakers passed legislation — Senate Bill 19-181 — ordering the oil and gas commission to prioritize public safety and protection of the environment before allowing oil and gas extraction in the state. That law instructs the oil and gas commission to “review and amend” rules on flowlines and inactive, temporarily abandoned and shut-down wells “to the extent necessary to ensure that the rules protect and minimize adverse impacts to public health, safety and welfare, and the environment.”
And lawmakers said companies must disclose to the public information on flowlines and inspect inactive flowlines before companies can re-activate them for moving oil and gas.
But the tens of thousands of miles of unregulated gathering lines aren’t addressed. Julie Murphy, the COGCC’s chief of staff, recently told commissioners they lack legal authority from lawmakers to regulate pipelines other than flowlines related to production.
“A lot of issues deserve scrutiny,” Robbins said. “We’re at the first stage of our rulemaking.”
Industry resists regulation
The state push for better control over flowlines, let alone gathering lines, faces industry objections. Oil and gas companies favor less regulation, not more. And lobbyists are raising concerns about proposals for stricter pipeline construction standards, inspections, mapping and removal of pipelines and other equipment after fossil-fuel extraction is finished.
Industry lobbyists have pressed for reliance on an existing safety system that requires residents, homebuilders and others who plan to dig — from house site excavation to tree-planting to installing a swimming pool — to call a national 811 phone number. Calls are routed to dispatchers who ask about planned projects, then notify oil and gas pipeline operators along with electric, phone, gas and other utilities that run underground lines. Companies then, if necessary, can send crews to proposed digging sites and locate possible underground lines.
Making maps available to the public, including property owners and homebuilders, could cause people to skip making 811 calls, said Granger of the Colorado Petroleum Council. “We just want to make sure folks aren’t using that in lieu of the 811 number.”
Vandalism and terrorism could become problems, too, she said, if pipeline locations are made public.
And a rule requiring removal of inactive pipelines could be costly, compelling companies to tear into private land against the wishes of owners and to dig up roads, she said.
“We’re still evaluating,” Granger said. “We want to make sure what we are discussing is reasonable and attainable — something we are able to comply with.”
Fossil-fuel companies also are raising concerns about proposals to require more high-pressure inspections of underground lines.
“Regular high-pressure testing that ensures safety is important, but it shouldn’t be so frequent that tests overly stress a piping system,” Colorado Oil and Gas Association President Dan Haley said in an email. “Common over-pressurization can prematurely fatigue pipes, leading to cracks and leaks that otherwise would not occur.”
Pipeline company officials relied on lobbyists rather than openly discuss safety and environmental issues, and industry plans for expansion.
Major operator DCP Midstream did not respond to queries from The Post. DCP Midstream representatives in the past have told state officials the company uses 3,700 miles of gathering lines in Colorado. Officials at Enterprise Products, which runs the 447-mile Colorado Front Range Pipeline, the 8,035-mile Mid-American Pipeline and a 190-mile gathering system in western Colorado, declined comment. Representatives of Western Gas Resources and Colorado Interstate Gas, companies that run thousands of miles of pipelines, also did not respond to requests for comment.
Gathering lines lost in limbo
This past month, state discussions bogged in a jurisdictional morass over who should take responsibility for the tens of thousands of miles of unregulated pipelines — issues that officials stalled on last year, too.
Federal pipelines and hazardous materials authorities have claimed jurisdiction for large interstate lines carrying oil and gas toward refineries. State oil and gas commissioners still look only at the flowlines that connect wells to nearby equipment and tanks. Nobody has stepped up to regulate the gathering lines that span 438,000 miles nationwide.
Federal officials acknowledged criticism for being “reactive” and now are trying to be “proactive,” federal pipeline safety liaison Tom Finch said.
New rules passed this month for oversight of large lines, including some rural lines, won’t lead to the regulation of most gathering lines, Finch said. And the feds face resistance when enforcing rules, he said. For example, inspectors encounter “pushback” when they try to shut down aging pipelines for maintenance where corrosion is suspected, Finch recently told Colorado officials.
“A lot of times there are some pipelines we need to shut down, and we get pressure the other way: ‘We need that pipeline,’ ” he said.
Finch referred to a fatal explosion in 2010 caused by a deficient pipeline in California that officials previously had thought was deteriorating. That 30-inch gas pipeline in the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno ruptured and exploded, killing eight people and destroying or severely damaging 55 homes.
Elsewhere, a broken 28-year-old, 2-inch diameter oil line near Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2015 spewed tens of thousands of gallons into the Pacific Ocean. A ruptured Enbridge Energy pipeline carrying heavy crude oil from Canada’s oil sands in 2010 spilled huge amounts into Michigan’s Talmadge Creek, which flows into the Kalamazoo River — one of the largest inland oil spills in U.S. history.
While federal pipeline officials have the power to enforce standards, the limitations of having 20 inspectors to cover regulated lines across 12 western states means inspections often don’t happen. “We get pretty spaced out,” Finch said. “We could always use more help to get more inspections.”
The federal government has certified the Colorado Public Utilities Commission to help conduct inspections of federally regulated pipelines. But the PUC relies on six inspectors who already are tasked with oversight of other utility lines statewide.
PUC pipeline safety program manager Joe Molloy recently addressed state oil and gas commissioners, raising concerns about the “somewhat discombobulated oversight of pipeline safety.”
Federal transportation officials “make it clear that (they have) jurisdiction over pipelines. In reality, they chose not to regulate certain things,” Molloy told the commissioners.
But the federal jurisdiction does not prevent states from passing and enforcing controls that are stricter than federal construction and testing standards, he said. And the PUC, as a certified agency, has the authority to set rules for companies operating in the state and conduct inspections to enforce the rules.
“Does the PUC have any plans to adopt those types of rules?” state oil and gas commissioner Erin Overturf asked.
“Not at this time,” Molloy said.
Overturf later summarized: “There are currently no standards governing the integrity of gathering lines,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Benefits and rising concerns
Few in Colorado dispute the benefits of pipelines compared with tanker trucks to move fossil fuels, though many favor a faster shift to clean energy. Neighborhood representatives fighting oil and gas industry proposals to drill and conduct hydraulic fracturing near people increasingly negotiate for pipelines.
“Pipelines are better than trucking all our oil and gas out, better than trucking water in and your flow-back” — waste that rises to the Earth’s surface after fracking — “out. There’s a lot of reasons you need your flowlines. And obviously pipelines are an important part of the infrastructure,” Colorado House Majority Leader KC Becker, D-Boulder, said. “But pipelines are going into new places, the volume is so much higher, and the pipelines go deeper. There could be a significant underground impact. And it could mean an impact on neighborhoods and communities.”
Some local governments are demanding maps before allowing the installation of pipelines on their turf. Northwest of Denver in Erie, town Trustee Christiaan van Woudenberg, who also helps lead Erie Rising activists, is calling for stricter state-level regulation and, ultimately, “a full migration to renewables” so that underground oil and gas lines aren’t necessary.
“There’s a risk of another Firestone,” said van Woudenberg, who lives with his daughters 50 feet south of a major transmission line and near flowlines from two industrial pads just north of his neighborhood. He’s spent $30,000 to install solar panels on his roof to meet energy needs.
“I’m worried for myself and my family and the residents of this community around ever-growing and aging oil and gas infrastructure,” he said.
And Colorado’s failure to provide public maps and ensure inspections 30 months after the Firestone explosion is fueling frustrations and anger among residents.
At a recent state oil and gas commission field hearing in Thornton, police stood by. State natural resources director Dan Gibbs, opening the hearing, prohibited disruptive conduct and asked residents who arrived with signs to take them out, an effort to ensure orderly discussion conducive to hearing from all sides.
“You have no idea where the pipelines and flowlines are located. You have no freakin’ clue where they are,” Colorado Rising board member Lauren Petrie shot back at the meeting. “How can we manage risk, and say something is safe, if we don’t even know where it is? You’re operating on wild guesses and no information. Pause all the permits until you can get a handle on what is happening with pipelines.”
Be the Change leader Phil Doe warned commissioners many of the nation’s underground oil and gas pipelines were installed before 1970, meaning ruptures may become more common. All the more reason, Doe said, to embrace their mandate from state legislators to prioritize the protection of public health and the environment.
“We’ve got a time bomb under our feet,” Doe said. “You have an obligation to regulate these.”
Colorado health officials’ role
Beyond the oil and gas commission, officials at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment are starting to target underground pipelines.
Under Polis, the department has embarked on a more aggressive approach to reducing air pollution. Air in nine Front Range counties for more than a decade has violated federal health standards. And air pollution control officials have identified fossil-fuel industry facilities, including pipelines, as significant sources of emissions of the heat-trapping methane and carbon dioxide that accelerate climate warming.
Health officials have proposed tighter controls on oil and gas companies that include requirements to measure and minimize emissions seeping up from underground pipelines — using infrared, aerial and other devices.
Cracking down on air pollution from pipelines would be a big new mission for air quality enforcers, division director Garry Kaufman said. But preventing leaks could help the state attain federal air quality standards, he said. Any effort to oversee pipeline pollution would require knowing where underground lines are located.
State health director Jill Hunsaker-Ryan listened to residents expressing concerns at the recent oil and gas commission field hearing. Among the notes she jotted: “What could CDPHE do?”
Neither the health department nor the commission has been certified by federal authorities for inspection of underground pipelines. Only the PUC, which lacks manpower, has that certified capability.
“The underpinnings of public health start with assessment,” Hunsaker-Ryan said in an interview. “We need that information. How are we better able to get that data? This is something we’ve got to get a handle on.”
Survivor on a mission
The hunt for a house away from pipelines has proved difficult for Erin Martinez, the blast survivor who lives in Weld County, which has become one of the nation’s biggest oilfields.
When she started looking for the first house to replace the one that blew up, Martinez said, her priority was “to give the kids a sense of stability.” She has worried especially about her son Nathan, now 14, who survived the explosion by leaping barefoot out his second-floor bedroom window, landing in debris and looking back as flames devoured the house where he knew his mother, father and uncle were inside.
He has a tendency to focus intensely on his fears, she said. So she was motivated, once they found the replacement house in Firestone that they all liked, to do all she could to make sure no pipelines ran near it.
In quizzing authorities, she learned there was an old well a mile from the new house. That seemed far enough way, so she and the kids moved into the home in October 2017. But several months later, they saw the Anadarko crews digging nearby. They watched as the men searched.
The builder was planning a second phase of housing development. “They weren’t finding anything” at first, Martinez said. Then she got a call from her lawyer. “‘They just wanted to let you know that they would be moving a little closer.’ ”
When the company crews finally found the old well, it was under the fenceline at the edge of her yard. “I couldn’t believe it. It was crazy.” She pressed for details. “They said it was a plugged and abandoned well and that all lines had been disconnected.”
But that assurance, given what happened before, “was not something I’m going to believe.”
Anadarko officials declined to discuss the situation. Last summer, Occidental Petroleum acquired Anadarko. An Occidental spokeswoman, Jennifer Brice, issued a statement: “Anadarko representatives were not involved in conversations regarding the purchase of the new home. The company took responsibility to locate the abandoned well on the neighboring property and provide detailed information about its location to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.”
Most troubling for Martinez was the loss of her son’s trust, and she said they struggled with his fears while finding the new house they were moving into this month.
“He just kept telling me, ‘It is going to happen again, mom! It is going to happen again!’ He put his trust in me, that I was going to find a house that was free of all oil and gas industry lines. And, basically, I lost his trust.”
This ordeal has compelled her push “to make sure nobody ever has to go through what my family is going through again. This has been an absolute nightmare for my family.”
To help her navigate the state’s bureaucratic processes, Martinez has hired an attorney. She’s making responsible oversight of underground oil and gas pipelines, promised more than two years ago, a personal mission that could “lend closure” so her children can heal.
“I don’t think we’ll ever have that peace or assurance,” she said. “But I’m hoping that, in the end, we can find a way to make it safer for everyone else.”
