Lines of fire: the only thing standing between you and a deadly oil pipeline accident is Washington's most hapless regulatory agency.

• Author: Pekow, Charles

AMANDA SMITH WAS ENJOYING A weekend of fishing and camping with her extended family along the banks of the Pecos River in New Mexico on Aug. 19, 2000. Early that morning, a few family members had set out to catch some fish, taking their lanterns with them to the river.

But instead of waking to the smell of fish frying, Amanda awoke to her children's screams. A corroded 50-year-old gas pipeline, which crossed the river next to the campground, had ruptured and sent a flaming fireball across the campground. Burning fuel rained down upon the campers. The fire was so hot it melted sand into glass and turned part of the concrete bridge into powder. Tents and sleeping bags turned to soup. The flames leapt 500 feet in the air, were visible from 30 miles away, and left a crater 86 feet long, 46 feet wide, and 20 feet deep.

Amanda Smith survived the fire only long enough to describe the horror of the scene to rescue workers. The explosion wiped out most of the Smith family, killing Amanda, her parents, her husband, her two kids, her brother and sister-in-law, their 22-month-old daughter and twin 6-month-old babies.

The New Mexico accident was just the latest in a string of horrific pipeline accidents over the past few years that have left hundreds of people dead or injured. Corroded pipes, operator errors, and outside damage are taking their toll on the nation's aging pipeline infrastructure. The sprawling network of more than 2 million miles of pipe and 150,000 miles of underground tubes carries 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and about 14.4 billion barrels of hazardous liquids such as propane and petroleum each year, a figure likely to grow. The number of accidents is also on the rise.

The U.S. Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) has counted 6,377 accidents between 1986 and August 2001. These incidents caused 376 deaths, 1,699 injuries, $1,140,697,582 in property damage, and a gross loss of 2,777,205 barrels of various oil fuels. (OPS can't quantify the loss of natural gas.)

Because of these accidents and the growing potential for new ones, safety experts and state officials have been pleading with OPS for years to mandate the kind of pipeline inspections that would have prevented the explosion in New Mexico. But OPS, a little-known agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), has routinely rebuffed suggestions that would increase enforcement of existing safety rules and dragged its feet on implementing new ones. More troubling, OPS has shown an unhealthy relationship with the industry that it regulates, which, incidentally, provides all of its budget and has a huge financial incentive to avoid regulation.

As a result, the existing regulatory structure leaks like a sieve, with virtually no government interference and few sanctions for those who violate the rules, even when they cause significant environmental damage. OPS had cited the owner of the pipeline that killed Amanda Smith and her family, the El Paso Energy Pipeline Group, for safety problems with its pipeline in Arizona in 1997, and again in 1999. But it took the deaths of 12 people before OPS really jumped into action. The agency is now seeking a $2.52 million civil fine against the El Paso Energy Pipeline Group for safety violations.

Pipeline operators do most of their own inspections and develop their own safety standards, and they're not required to inspect regularly. And federal pipeline rules are so lax that, for instance, pipeline operators aren't even required to close their pipeline spigots when they find leaks. And they have an incentive not to, given that their income depends on keeping those spigots open and flowing. Many of the nation's pipelines aren't regulated at all by the feds--such as gathering lines that take crude oil to refineries, which Congress exempted from OPS oversight. Most of those lines didn't traverse heavily populated zones, so why bother protecting nature if nobody lives there?

"There are around 60,000 miles of unregulated pipelines and they leak like crazy," says Bob Rackleff, a commissioner of Leon County, Fla., who has spearheaded the National Pipeline Reform Coalition to push tougher regulation.

It generally takes a major explosion for the government to get involved. "There is almost no enforcement," says Lois Epstein, an engineer who followed pipeline safety for Environmental Defense in Washington, D.C., for 13 years. "Companies decide the appropriateness of their own lines with no federal standards."

Boiled in Oil

Even a horrific accident, though, doesn't seem to be enough to spur OPS--or Congress--to make meaningful change to protect the public from dangerous pipelines, which are increasingly turning up under heavily populated areas. Just a year before the New Mexico explosion, in June 1999, in Bellingham, Wash., Wade King and his buddy Stephen Tsiorvas, both 10, hiked down to a local creek where they found a lighter. As 10-year-old boys will do, they started to play with it.

Unbeknownst to the boys, a 33-year-old pipeline carrying jet fuel, gasoline, and other petroleum products lay directly underneath the boys' neighborhood. It had already...