Natural Gas Pipeline Rupture and Explosion in San Bruno Kills at Least One and Destroys More than 50 Homes
PG&E has confirmed that a twenty-four inch natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, CA ruptured during the evening of September 9, 2010, causing a fireball estimated at 200-300 feet in height that burned for several hours. The fire started at 6:00 pm, just before sunset, and was announced as being contained at 11 pm. It igniting dozens of fires that have destroyed more than 50 homes and killed at least one person. There are injuries reported, but no details are available yet. The explosion produced a crater that is at least 15 feet deep, twenty feet long and thirty feet wide. The rupture and explosion damaged nearby water mains, delaying firefighting efforts for more than half an hour.
There is breaking news video coverage available at KGO TV in San Francisco. KGO has also started a still photo library that currently includes more than 80 dramatic photos of the devastated neighborhoods. Look for the page headline of 1 dead after large explosion, fire in San Bruno.
This post will be updated as others provide additional details.
Update: (9/10/2010 0317) The San Jose Mercury News puts the injury total at more than two dozen with critical injuries. San Bruno explosion and fire destroys dozens of homes; one dead, many injured. This article includes some first hand accounts and the following summary from an experienced, but retired, first responder.
“What makes this fire so devastating and so difficult is essentially it creates the equivalent of an eight-alarm fire in the heart of a residential neighborhood,” retired Contra Costa Fire Battalion Chief Dave George said. “It behaves differently than most other fires because it grows in all directions at the same time. Whatever it wants to do, it does.”
George said the heat of the fire would be upward of 1,200 degrees, which could create radiant heat hot enough to burn a couch inside a brick home through the window.
“This is really a worst-case scenario,” he said. “The closest thing to something like this is when a wildland fire hits a residential neighborhood.”
The San Francisco Chronicle has additional details Gas line explosion burns San Bruno neighborhood. According to Chronicle, the count of homes destroyed is 53 with another 120 homes that are damaged as of 10 pm on September 9th. The fires have prevented a complete assessment, but the county coroner has indicated that the death total is not yet known:
Deputy San Mateo County Coroner April Florent said “there are deaths, but we do not have a number right now.” She said it would take awhile to compile a count because investigators must go from house to house.
Update: (9/11/2010 1000)
- CNN article dated September 10, 2010 titled California pipeline blast raises safety questions provides some information about the overall safety record of the pipeline industry and some specifics about recent PG&E experience.
- Lamorinda Patch has a post titled Blood Donors Needed For San Bruno Explosion Victims
- The Los Angeles Times published an article titled A danger lurking underground that includes some information about why the locations of natural gas pipelines and other utilities are often not well known.
- The San Francisco Chronicle has updated the death toll to 4 people in an article titled ‘It looks like a war zone’. The Chronicle is also advertising a Sunday, September 12, 2010 12 page special section with photos and remembrances from the “San Bruno inferno”.
- LA Now (a local blog from the Los Angeles Times) posted an entry quoting an National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigator describing a section of the pipe that had ruptured. The 30 inch diameter pipe was blown a surprising distance from the crater. The inspector also reported that the pipe had been installed in 1956. The same blog also includes a post indicating that California lawmakers are are planning to review pipeline safety and inspection programs.
- San Jose Mercury News confirms that the search for bodies has ended with a total of four found (as of 09/11/2010 12:42:11 AM PDT). The Mercury News story also reports that there were 37 homes completely destroyed with 8 more that were seriously damaged.
- The Daily Mail online has personal stories and a large collection of photos in a September 11, 2010 story titled Mother and teenage daughter among the dead in San Francisco gas blast horror
Update: (September 13, 2010 0550)
- The Washington Post – September 13, 2010 Residents return home after Calif pipeline blowout. There are still 4 people missing and investigators are trying to determine if some of the remains found are human. Sixty people were injured, some critically. The 28 foot long section of 30″ diameter pipe that was blown out of the crater and landed more than 100 feet away has been transported to Washington, DC for evaluation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) the organization responsible for investigating pipeline accidents.
- San Francisco Chronicle – September 13, 2010 San Bruno blast: PG&E ordered to check pipes. A portion of the same pipeline that exploded had been planned for replacement. According to a document about the project description filed in a recent PG&E rate case “the risk stemming from a possible failure of the pipe is “unacceptably high.”” According to the SF Chronicle article, four of the victims are being treated for critical burns.
- New York Times – September 13, 2010 After Blast, Uneasiness for Residents Going Home.
Maria Monroy, 41, cannot shake the fear she felt at seeing a ball of flame engulfing her neighborhood and people running barefoot and screaming in the street. “We’re blessed our house is O.K.,” said Ms. Monroy, who has been staying at a nearby hotel with her husband and three daughters. “But we lived through that explosion. I’m traumatized. I have not slept in three days. Just because my h
ouse is fine does not mean I’m O.K.”
Update: (September 28, 2010) Energy Central Self-inflicted wounds make PG&E’s effort to rebuild trust a tall order. The current death toll is up to seven people.
“PG&E does some wonderful things with renewable energy and climate change. They have all sorts of innovative solar and energy efficiency programs,” said Chris Raphael, editor of California Energy Markets, a weekly publication that tracks the electricity industry.”But at the same time they have this history of creating a rift sometimes between them and their customers.”
This is a very tragic event. I feel very sorry for the people who were injured, killed and lost their homes. This explosion came with no warning and was so intense it broke a water main and firefighters had no water to fight it for some time. Plane and helicopter water drops were required. The ferocity of this blaze was incredible.
The other tragedy is the fact that this type of event happens with some regularity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents
I’m about a mile and a half from the area the explosion took place. We could see the glow of the flames above the hill separating us from that area. This morning, driving to work down H280 the usual fog was replaced by an acrid smoke hanging over the area, between San Bruno and the SFO, the big air port nearby.
We didn’t hear the explosion but we started getting calls from everyone in the area to look south toward the gas fire…a huge plume of brown smoke rising in what was a cloudless day.
We accept industrial accidents as par for the course in an industrial society such as ours. Risk wise…we live with it. Nuclear offers at least the chance to move to an electron based energy consumer society instead of direct fossil fuel usage. Lets transition to that.
David Walters
Jason. Such accidents are rare in the U S, by your list. Nothing can be made perfectly safe, but a major pipeline running through a residential area would be inspected fairly often in this country. Often, a pipeline explosion is not a completely spontaneous event. Someone digs a backhoe into it, or someone explodes something else (like a meth lab) on top of it. Back in the day when I knew something about these things, pipelines many required inspections with pigs with cameras on them and so forth. It’s been a while though. I will be very interested to see what the cause of this one is.
It is terribly tragic. My first reaction was being terrified: Is my friend okay? My best friend in the world lives in San Carlos. Luckily, that’s at some distance from the explosion. San Bruno, Burlngame, San Carlos, right? The stops on the SP commuter line, as I remember them…
This is definitely one of the worst fossil fuel industrial accidents I’ve seen happen in the Bay Area. There have been several explosions at the refineries in Martinez and Richmond California over the past 20+ years. I remember one of those rattling the windows of the house from 10 miles away. We could see the fire glow from that distance as well.
About 3 years ago, a petroleum pipeline was punctured near my old high school and killed 3 construction workers and burned several homes to the ground.
I’m sure we will hear very illogical comparisons in the aftermath of this accident, just as we did after Deep-Horizon, along the lines of “thank goodness it wasn’t a nuclear accident, then we’d really have a disaster”. This type of shameless redirection of the real dangers of fossil fuels is nonsense and must be put in its place.
Yes, San Carlos is about 10 miles south of where this took place. Since the explosion was very close to the SF International Airport, people thought initially it might have been a plane crash.
The list on Wikipedia is not mine of course and the list itself states it is incomplete.
I would argue there are degrees of rarity among tragic events. One could say fatal car accidents are fairly rare yet the small probability of occurrence leads to devastating death tolls every year.
I had a personal experience with a gas leak at an apartment building where I used to live. The leak was outside by the meter, it must have been going on for a few hours as a cloud of invisible gas had accumulated under the side entry way at the side of the building. I smelled the gas but didn’t realize I was walking into a small cloud of it until I took a few breaths and almost passed out. My vision started to darken and I felt extremely dizzy. Once I got through the door I started to feel better but I know others have not been so lucky. Natural gas can kill whether it’s been ignited or not. I have rarely met anyone who has never witnessed the volatility and danger of fossil fuels first hand. Once you’ve seen and felt these dangers first hand in some experience, somehow it just doesn’t seem all that rare. It feels more like an accident is always waiting to happen.
Jason Ribeiro wrote:
I’m sure we will hear very illogical comparisons in the aftermath of this accident, just as we did after Deep-Horizon, along the lines of “thank goodness it wasn’t a nuclear accident, then we’d really have a disaster”.
Fossil fuels accidents cause many more deaths per unit of energy than nuclear. But everyone knows that fossil fuel accidents cause only mild death, while nuclear accidents cause severe death.
@Jason — The loss of human life is tragic, no matter what the cause. And to the extent that this could have been avoided, I trust that whatever actions are needed to determine what went wrong those will be put into place.
CNBC ran a series of comparisons on DeepWater Horizon, one of which is here:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/38294088/What_Does_184_Million_Gallons_of_Oil_Look_Like?slide=9
I bring this up not to excuse BP or Big Oil, but to lend some perspective – like what Rod has done with the tritium leak at Vermont Yankee. The Gulf appears to be recovering much faster than Prince William Sound following Exxon Valdez, probably due to water temperature and the massive inflow of water into the Gulf from the Mississippi River (which I have walked over … at the headwaters at Lake Itasca in Minnesota).
If we only generate 1% of electricity from oil but 20+% from natural gas and natural gas is used for cooking and heating (is that the likely application in the San Bruno area?), then the goal ought to be to replace natural gas for those applications and use nuclear-generated electricity. Of course, we need to overcome the ban on new nuclear power plants in California to get there.
Foxnews is reporting the death toll is up to 4.
I am a little surprised that this story is old news already. Good thing for the NG industry that crazies are talking about burning the Koran.
We can only imagine the hoopla if the fire was at nuke plant.
To be sure, NG is statistically one of the best ways to provide energy. For all of you that use random accidents arguments to support nuclear power it sounds the same as the anti-nukes, you are idiots.
As Meridith suggests it will be interesting to know what the root cause is. If it is a weak corporate safety culture should we look at other things PG&E does?
If you just count the Deaths caused by NG explosions it sure seems to me that the “general public” is far worse off (say an order of magnitude) living near any NG pipe line than living near a nuclear power plant, even Chernobyl. The same could also be said for the “utiulity worker” working for NG as compared to a nuclear power plant.