Pipelines, and the hazardous products they transport, are critical to our nation’s economy, security, and way of life. Construction accidents involving pipelines, no matter what the cause, reveal the power of pipelines. Life loss, property and environmental damage.
Accidents
Construction equipment causes water main break damage in Virginia Beach
Construction equipment causes water main break damage in Virginia Beach
Georgian woman cuts off web access to whole of Armenia
An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper to sell as scrap when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to all of neighboring Armenia, it emerged on Wednesday. The woman, 75, had been digging for the metal not far from the capital Tbilisi when […]
The One Fiber Optic Cable No One on the Dig for Tysons Rail Wants to Hit
This part happens all the time: A construction crew putting up an office building in the heart of Tysons Corner a few years ago hit a fiber optic cable no one knew was there. This part doesn’t: Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits […]
The luckiest guys alive after cutting through high voltage underground cable
It was supposed to be a routine job – a simple water line installation for a private home. And for Tony D’Angelo, a supervisor with Gen-Con Excavating in Philadelphia, that was a good thing. On any given day, 15 backhoes dedicated to Gen-Con’s plumbing business are out in Philadelphia and […]
The Backhoe: A Real Cyberthreat
At half-past noon on Jan. 9, cable TV contractors sinking a half-mile of cable near Interstate 10 in rural Arizona pulled up something unexpected in the bucket of their backhoe: an unmarked fiber-optic cable. “It started pulling the fiber out of the pipe,” says Scott Johansson, project manager for JK […]
Buried trouble: Owners dig up costly repairs
Excavation is the main cause of damage to lines such as the gas service being installed above, utility officials say. “Out of sight, out of mind” might work for relationships, but it certainly does not for homeowners’ responsibility for what’s underneath their property. Property owners are usually responsible for any […]
Backhoe Severs buried Electrical Power Cable
On February 12, 2002, at the construction site for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a backhoe operator struck and severed a buried 240-volt temporary power cable with his backhoe bucket. This tripped a circuit breaker and the operator was not injured. The contractor reported […]