Atmos Energy executives this morning were grilled by Dallas City Council members as the company gave an update on its response to a fatal gas explosion and outage that killed a 12-year-old girl and forced the evacuation of hundreds of northwest Dallas residents earlier this year.
Among the questions Atmos provided mostly unsatisfactory answers to: Can any entity other than Atmos—the Texas Railroad Commission, perhaps—assure us that the gas system is safe? If “geological factors” specific to that area were responsible for the explosion in northwest Dallas, why didn’t we see water and sewer lines also break in February? Why couldn’t you prevent this, despite the “warning signs?” What exactly did those millions of dollars of rate hikes over the last few years pay for?
Atmos says it plans to replace all the cast iron pipes in Dallas with plastic by 2023, cast iron being the oldest and most potentially dangerous material used for pipelines. Meanwhile, here’s this Google map of completed and ongoing Atmos Energy projects in Dallas. And while we’re looking at maps, here’s a good one from the Environmental Defense Fund.
From January 2015 through February 2016, the environmental group, relying on Google Street View cars equipped with methane sensors, mapped natural gas leaks in Dallas and other cities. The Environmental Defense Fund, which says that about 50 percent of the main lines in Dallas are more than 50 years old, found “an average of about one leak for every two miles we drove within the study area.”
The EDF, mostly concerned with the impact of leaking methane on climate change, cautions that these methane leaks pose no immediate threat to health or safety. The color code here (low-risk yellow and high-risk red) is concerned with the climate impact of gas leaks. And the study area is limited, as you can see from the screenshot below.
