OIL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL: The real mystery has never been what caused the Plains All American Pipeline rupture in the first place. It’s always been why it didn’t happen sooner and much worse. These are not the doom-n-gloom musings by someone given to apocalyptic dementia. Instead, this question is triggered by new documentation — at least to me — detailing chronic quality-control problems that dogged construction of the All American Pipeline when it was first laid into the ground back in the 1980s. County records from that time show that 15 percent of the pipeline welds inspected during a three-day audit failed to meet minimum standards. That’s a lot. When those three days were up, Celeron denied the pipeline experts hired by the county further access to welding records.
I stumbled onto this new information while exploring how and why Plains All American — more precisely, its predecessor Celeron/All American — came to be the one and only pipeline operator in Santa Barbara County to successfully challenge the county’s authority to oversee and regulate pipeline-integrity issues. Why, I wondered, did Celeron take the County of Santa Barbara to federal court when none of the other pipeline owners operating in Santa Barbara saw fit to do the same? Because Celeron prevailed in that showdown, pipeline safety inspections and enforcement for the All American line were relegated to an egregiously understaffed and underfunded federal safety agency — the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), at which the top three executive leadership positions are now conspicuously vacant.
So what sparked the legal dispute that put PMHSA in the driver’s seat? Some blandly generic assertion of jurisdictional testosterone? It’s much more disturbing than that. By 1986, county administrators had grown concerned about allegations of slipshod welding practices by the crews laying the pipeline. Accordingly, the county hired a civil engineer who specialized in integrity audits of massive industrial projects, Richard K. Shogren. For three days in November 1986, an engineer employed by Shogren, Carl Ward, met with Celeron metallurgical engineer Rick Hill in the company’s Bakersfield offices. They rummaged through four boxes of radiographs — X-ray images showing the complete circumference of a weld. In all, 58 radiographs were inspected, a small test sample of the 9,500 welds throughout All American’s 70-mile stretch of pipe. Of the 58, seven were of such poor quality no assessment could be made. Of the 51 remaining, eight failed to meet the minimal standards established by the American Petroleum Institute. Of those eight, five failed to meet the minimal standards set by Celeron itself. No matter how Shogren did the math, only 60 percent of the welds inspected met minimum standards. Assuming the same proportions were manifest throughout the 70 miles of pipe running through the county, Shogren estimated there could be as many as 1,425 substandard welds. If the welds were assessed based on Celeron’s own standards, he concluded there could be as many as 900.