Gas explosion highlights creaking US infrastructure

By Andy Goldberg Sep 15, 2010, 11:21 GMT

San Francisco - The scenarios sound like plot elements for a Hollywood disaster movie, or the fantasies of a terrorist mastermind.

A huge fireball explodes in the heart of San Francisco. The New York public transport system is crippled when three separate rail systems break down on the same day. A highway bridge collapses into the Mississippi River at the height of rush hour. And a network of ageing levees crumble, plunging New Orleans under metres of water.

But these incidents are real and far more more frightening than what any screenwriter or al-Qaeda planner could dream up.

They are examples of the risk posed by America's ageing infrastructure, the result of decades of lower taxation, starved public investment and a culture of neglect in the foundations of the world's largest economy.

The explosion of the 75-centimetre gas transmission line last week in the San Francisco suburb of San Bruno was the latest canary call in the US coal mine. Across the country, citizens, journalists and emergency planners looked at the apocalyptic pictures from the city on the Bay and asked themselves the same question: Could it happen here?

Their answers, in most cases, were yes - the disconcerting results of a rusting network of natural gas pipelines installed 50 years ago or more through rural areas and now overbuilt with densely populated suburbs.

'Are our homes sitting on top of a ticking bomb?' asked the San Francisco Examiner in a typical note of worry.

According to the Pipeline Safety Trust, a non-affiliated advocacy group, more than 60 per cent of the country's natural gas transmission lines were installed before 1970. Like the one that blew up in San Bruno, many of these have 50-year life spans, after which the metal begins to corrode and the risk of rupture increases.

The Pipeline Safety Trust says there are few rules that prevent such pipes running through residential areas, and that the private companies running US energy systems are charged with supervising their own lines. Federal oversight is little more than a formality, with just 100 inspectors tasked with overseeing a national network of some 1.6 million kilometres of natural gas lines.

The apparently decrepit state of the natural gas system is emblematic of a much wider problem.

A report issued last year by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave an overall D grade to the nation's infrastructure and estimated that it would take a 2.2-trillion-dollar investment over five years to bring it up to scratch.

Against that figure, US President Barack Obama's heralded 50- billion-dollar infrastructure investment plan announced last week seems little more than a finger in the dike.

One major danger highlighted by the report was the country's levee system, much of which was built with rammed earth to protect crops, but now protects entire cities.

The danger of catastrophic failure was illustrated in New Orleans, but a far worse disaster could happen in California, where a network of ageing levees is all that lies between the sprawling Sacramento delta and numerous cities around San Francisco and Sacramento.

'Sacramento has become one of the biggest growth areas in our country,' Stephen Flynn, author of the book The Edge of Disaster, told National Public Radio. 'And folks are packing up and moving essentially onto these flood plains, where the only thing that is protecting their homes are these earthen works that are falling apart.'

He condemned the failure since the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans just five years ago, to address the country's looming infrastructure needs.

'When we have a disaster like Katrina, we go back to sort of business as usual,' Flynn said. 'We pretend that this was just something that is a rare event, instead of an almost certain event over a period of time.'