Unruly winds were still spreading the fires late into the night on Thursday in San Bruno, California, after an explosion in the San Francisco satellite community set more than 50 homes on fire. People in the area thought they had witnessed a plane crash, hearing a loud rumbling and watching a fireball lift up into the afternoon sky. In fact, what they had very likely witnessed was a rupture on a natural gas pipeline. A few hours later, at least one person had been killed in the ensuing flames and police were scrambling to account for all the residents who had fled their homes.
Natural gas pipelines are all around us, stretching over 2 million miles throughout the country and providing a quarter of America's energy. More than 650,000 miles of new pipeline were added in the U.S. between 1986 and 2004, according to the American Gas Association (AGA). Explosions in lines carrying the highly flammable methane-filled gas do happen, but the AGA says they are occurring less and less, citing a 28% decline in reportable incidents in that same 18-year period.
Read more on original post: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/09/10/the-san-francisco-explosion-another-strike-against-an-industry-under-scrutiny/
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