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CounterPunch
November
7, 2002
Earthquakes
and Alaska's Oil
Rockin' the Pipeline
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
It was the biggest quake to hit North America
this century, a 7.9 jolt centered beneath the tundra about 80
miles south of Fairbanks that tickled seismographs all the way
to New Orleans.
The November 4rh trembler opened zizag
fissures in the earth, mangled roads, crushed a few remote cabins,
triggered landslides and cracked concrete from Fairbanks to Anchorage.
The Denali Fault appears to be awakening
from a relatively long slumber. The fault, which curves through
the Canadian Yukon through the Alaska Range past Mt. McKinley
in Denali National Park, is the longest in the US where plates
move horizontally, with land to the north slipping east and land
to the south sliding west. It's a violent mix.
On October 23, a 6.7 quake rocked an
area just south of the epicenter of latest quake. "They're
a very interesting pair of earthquakes," said Roger Hansen,
a seismologist at the Earthquake Information Center in Fairbanks.
"One began and unzipped in one direction, and the second
just unzipped the fault in the other." Hundreds of aftershocks
continue to swarm across Alaska, some as powerful as 5.7.
Still for all rumbling only one person
has been injured, a 76-year old woman from Mentasa Lake who broke
her arm when she fell down the stairs of her home.
But the Denali quake did shake the foundations
of the TransAlaska Pipeline, the oil industry's conduit for North
Slope crude that slithers across the heart of the Alaskan outback
like a metallic colon. The pipeline, which carries about a billion
barrels of oil a day, was shut down hours after the quake and
remained closed for days.
In its 800-mile trek from the belching
ruin of Prudhoe Bay to the tanker ship terminals of Valdez, the
pipeline crosses eighty rivers and streams, three mountain ranges,
and it dips under coves, ponds and marshes. The oil courses through
the line at 140-degrees. A rupture would spill steaming crude
oil onto some of the most ecologically frail lands in the world
and make the Exxon Valdez spill seem like an oil stain on a driveway
by comparison.
The pipeline is managed by the Alyeska
Corporation, a consortium of the oil companies that exploit the
reserves of the North Slope: BP, Phillips Petroleum, Exxon Mobil,
Williams, Unocal and Amerada Hess. For the past 25 years, Alyeska's
flacks have maintained that the pipeline is invulnerable to natural
disasters.
But hours after the quake throttled the
Alaskan interior came reports that the several of the H-shaped
brackets that hold the 48-inch pipeline off the ground had buckled
and broken. So far engineers have identified 8 severely damaged
supports, including two consecutive ones near the point where
the pipeline crosses the Denali Fault.
The foulest fantasies of Dick Cheney
and his cohorts to extract the rest of the North Slope's reserves
may well rest on those frail and battered supports. Oil production
at Prudhoe Bay is declining. Thus the oil companies are anxious
to extend their domain west into the National Petroleum reserve,
east into Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and north into the
Beaufort Sea. All of that oil would have to be sluiced down the
pipeline to Valdez.
One of the big questions concerns the
valves in the underground sections of the pipeline, long considered
the most likely point for a catastrophic breach during a quake.
Aleyska says it will send "sniffer probes" down tubes
check the valves.
There's enormous pressure from the oil
companies to get the pipeline back in operation. Quickly. It's
estimated that more than $25 million of crude flows through the
pipeline everyday.
Of course with this much at stake, you
can't count on Alyeska to tell the truth about the damage to
the pipeline. This is a company with a history of lies and abuse
of employees who have tried to tell the truth about problems
with the pipeline in the past.
Richard Acord was a safety inspector
on the pipeline. Back in 1991, he witnessed what has become a
fairly typical occurrence. At Milepost 113.6, the pipeline dips
below ground for one of 25 animal crossings, allowing caribou
and other migrating animals to cross the pipeline corridor. A
giant drilling rig, weighing more than 60,000 pounds, tried to
cross over the buried line on wooden planks, slid off and sunk
in the mud directly above the pipeline. The truck's oil line
broke, spilling diesel fuel onto the tundra. Acord tried to issue
a stop-work order to ensure that the pipeline itself had not
been damaged in the accident and to develop a plan to extract
the rig without further damage to fouled tundra. The drilling
crew's supervisor chastised Acord and told him that he would
either play ball or "they would find someone who would."
"We had oil running down the tundra,"
Acord stated in a deposition about the event. "We had a
rig stuck across the pipeline, indeterminate material in the
ground. All of those constitute a bad situation." After
going public, Acord was fired.
Acord is not alone. In 1994, four other
safety inspector's settled a whistleblower lawsuit with Alyeska,
claiming, among other things, that the pipeline company blacklisted
them from other jobs in the oil industry after they raised complaints
about worker safety and environmental practices.
Take the case of Charles Hammel. Back
in the late 1980s, pipeline workers and inspectors began feeding
Hammel information problems with the pipeline and with Alyeska's
reckless cost-cutting and mismanagement. Hammel, an independent
oil broker, took these concerns to congress and Alyeska was forced
to spend millions of dollars to repair corrosion along the line.
The company, and the oil corporations
behind it, didn't like this one bit, so they went after Hammel
with a vengeance. In 1990, they hired the Wackenhut Corporation
dig up dirt on Hammel. They rummaged through his trash, ran credit
reports on him, set up a fake enviro group to trick him into
giving them information and even hired a hooker to try to seduce
him. Hammel sued the company for invasion of privacy and won
a $5 million settlement.
But that didn't stop Alyeska's sleazy
tactics. When whistleblowers raised concerns to management or
went public, they were fired. After one inspector got subpoenaed
to testify before congress, his manager told him that he'd "break
his fucking arm" if he said anything to damage the company.
When auditors from the BLM and other
outfits began to look at Alyeska's books, the company's managers
were caught "file stuffing"-adding post-dated documents
to make the thin records look more robust. When one employee
refused to go along, his manager threatened to fire him on the
spot. In fact, Alyeska was so brazen in its intimidation tactics
that it even spied on California Congressman George Miller, then
the chairman of the House Interior Committee.
Of course, Alyeska has plenty to cover
up. A series of audits since 1990 have disclosed thousands of
code violations. The company's maps don't accurately depict the
location of the pipeline. Indeed, in one instance, Alyeska's
maps showed the pipeline being more than a mile away from its
real location.
The fact is the pipeline already leaks
and has nearly since the beginning. The fact is that the leaks
are getting worse and more frequent as the pipeline ages. Between
1979 and 1993, the pipeline averaged about two shutdown incidents
a year. Since then, the rate has increased to more than 8 a year.
Last year, a 21-inch shift in a section of pipeline at Atigun
Pass went undetected by Alyeska for several months. This is oil
spillage as normalcy.
As the problems get worse, Alyeska becomes
more and more stingy, cutting costs at every turn. In the past
five years, the company has cut manned stations along the pipeline
from 11 down to four. That lack of oversight led to oil spraying
undetected from the pipeline for more than 36 hours after a couple
of drunks shot holes into it-simultaneously showing terrorist
how easy it could be to turn the Alaskan tundra into a frozen
facsimile of the Kuwaiti oil fields following Saddam's retreat.
None of this fazes the Bush administration,
which is moving swiftly to reauthorize the pipeline for 30 more
years of service.
"You can't help but think about
your physical safety when you are costing somebody $500 million,"
said one Alyeska whistleblower. "The theory is that they
will use the equipment until the line is destroyed. When you
step back and look at the big picture, God it stinks."
Of course, one more twitch from the uneasy
depths of Denali could bring it all crashing down.
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