OIL & GAS PIPELINE ACCIDENTS:

Failure Mechanisms in Non-Technical Language

TASA ID: 18867

Oil and gas pipeline construction in the U.S. has grown steadily over the years at a rate of approximately 10,000 miles per year. As of 2019, more than 2.6 million miles of natural gas and 219,000 miles of hazardous liquid pipelines were operating in the United States.

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s PHMSA agency began tracking serious accidents in 2000. The latest failure rates reported by PHMSA show 0.01 failures per 1000 miles for hazardous liquid pipelines, 11 failures per 1,000,000 miles for gas distribution pipelines, and 0.008 failures per 1000 miles of gas transmission pipelines. Despite such low probabilities of failure, accidents do occur often making news due to the spectacular way they fail and the likelihood of deaths and injuries.

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