Experts say the nation's 296,000 miles of onshore natural-gas lines routinely suffer breakdowns and failures.
More than 60 percent of the lines are 40 years old or older and almost half were installed in the 1950s and 1960s, according to a recent analysis by the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Bellingham, Wash.
Most of the older pipelines lack anticorrosion coatings that are prevalent in the industry today, said Carl Weimer, executive director of the trust, which was set up following a 1999 explosion that killed three people in Bellingham.
"The industry always says that if you take care of pipelines, they'll last forever," Weimer said. "But what we see over and over again is companies are not doing that and corrosion and other factors are causing failures."(1)
The problem is this work is not sufficiently profitable in the narrow short-term way that private capital measures such things. So, just have government do it through direct hiring.
---
1'Crews Search San Bruno Homes After Blast Kills 4' - CBS News
1 comment:
"The problem is this work is not sufficiently profitable..."
Exactly.
Post a Comment