| Report on 2007 Burnaby oil spill released
VANCOUVER — A sewer contractor and a pipeline operator, who worked from an inaccurate 50-year-old map and who failed to confirm exactly where the line was located, caused the spectacular rupture that spewed 234,00 litres of crude oil across Burnaby homes, streets and into Burrard Inlet two years ago.
And the leak was made worse when operators shut off the wrong end of the pipeline — trapping oil instead of bleeding the line.
That was the finding of a federal Transportation Safety Board report released today. The crude gushed from a trench on Inlet Drive on July 24, 2007, after an excavator working on a sewer project struck the four-kilometre pipeline that fed oil from storage tanks uphill to the docks below.
Dozens of people were forced from their homes as the geyser coated buildings and trees and ran downhill through storm sewers into Burrard Inlet, causing millions in damages and cleanup costs that are still the subject of lawsuits.
The TSB report found that the key cause was the failure of both the contractor, who had been hired to do a sewer upgrade for the city, and Kinder Morgan Canada, which operated the pipeline, to simply walk the line with equipment that would have confirmed its precise location — and then to stake it.
Both sides have an obligation “to each other” to follow federal regulations on working near pipelines, said Larry Gales, manager of pipeline inspections for the TSB. In the Burnaby spill, the contractor did get permission from Kinder Morgan to work near the line, which both parties assumed lay in the straight line marked on a 1957 drawing.
But the location was not confirmed by Kinder Morgan through a proper hand-search along the route with a detector, there was poor communication about when the contractor would be digging, and neither side arranged supervision of the digging by Kinder Morgan — something both sides should have done, the report says.
“All parties believed that the [pipe]line and the sewer line ran parallel,” Gales said. “There was no reason for them to doubt the maps, but the maps were in error.”
In fact, the pipeline snaked along the route, off in spots by as much as four metres from the drawings. At some points, that put it in the line of sewer excavation.
The TSB found that Kinder Morgan had done 25 previous physical pipeline verifications during field inspections but had not updated its drawings and did not use the fresher information during reviews of the sewer project. Although supervised hand-digging was required in such close proximity to the pressurized pipeline, an unsupervised excavator was used.
Evidence later showed the operator struck the line five times before rupturing it.
“Any of the five impacts, with two of these impacts leaking oil, could have alerted the on-site supervisors that there was a problem,” the report says.
Crude oil sprayed 15 to 20 metres in the air for 25 minutes after the strike. Because the tanks were at a higher elevation, oil continued to flow after pumps were shut off. But operators also closed the valves downstream at the dock in contravention of Kinder’s emergency procedures, “intensifying” the leak, the report says.
Asked why the report contained none of the usual recommendations for improvements, Gales said that, essentially none were required — beyond following regulations now in place.
“If they had followed [present regulations], we probably would not be here today,” Gales said.
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