No Legal Sanction - Nothing - Against TX Co. Whose Gas Pipeline Exploded, Killing Toddler In Home

[hatrack]

https://thumbnails.texastribune.org/YfMb_bYRKDdM6gSrYfrZtlkAvpA=/850x570/smart/filters:quality(70)/

STANTON — Delaney Tercero, 3, was sitting on her family's couch with her father and sister that summer day. Her mother was doing laundry. They didn't know a pipeline with a dime-sized hole a few yards from their front door was filling their mobile home with raw natural gas. Delaney's mother opened the dryer. The house blew up.

Men pulled Delaney from the rubble. A neighbor wrapped her in a scarf, trying to comfort her. Others rubbed burn cream on her sister's burns. Witnesses told responders her mother was burned "head to toe." A helicopter whirled Delaney to a burn unit in Lubbock, but she died two days later, 100 miles from home. Her mother, father and sister were badly burned in the Aug. 9, 2018, explosion, but they lived. That still amazes their next-door neighbor, Ronnie Littlefield.

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But Targa Resources Corp., the $9.6 billion Houston company that owns the line, will face no penalty from state or federal officials for the explosion. Targa didn't violate any rules because for this type of pipeline, there are no rules. They're called "gathering lines," generally small pipelines carrying oil and gas from wellheads to processing sites. The Targa pipe was connected to a battery of tanks near the two homes in the pumpjack-studded farm fields outside Midland. Targa did not respond to repeated requests for comment. It was a small part of a network of thousands of miles of pipes underlying the frenzied oil and gas development in the Permian Basin. Nationally, more than 450,000 miles of such gathering lines snake underground from wells, and reports of death and injury have emerged from Texas to Pennsylvania.

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One attempt to set new gathering line standards began in late 2017 when the American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry's largest trade group, proposed a new industry standard for gathering lines. Drawn by a private committee consisting overwhelmingly of industry representatives, the standards were to be voluntary. But the effort collapsed last summer. State regulators dropped out in June, saying the process was too dominated by industry. Pipeline company representatives split on issues such as whether they should have to determine the width of the blast zone around their lines. When voting concluded in early July, only about one-third of committee voters supported the proposal they had crafted.

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https://www.texastribune.org/2019/03/07/oil-gas-deadly-pipelines-no-rules/

[secondwind]

1. Capitalism unchecked is just plain evil

[efhmc]

2. Petroleum rules Texas and always supports the GOP which is why even Beto did not win

and which makes it so hard to effect any change.