Tiny leak found; Olympic keeps pipeline closed

By Maureen O'Hagan
Seattle Times staff reporter

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Officials have pegged the cause of Sunday's fire in a fuel pipeline as a "pinhole-sized leak," but Olympic Pipe Line is still investigating how it happened. Meanwhile, the 400-mile pipeline remained closed for a second day.

The leak, visible to the naked eye, was not in the main line but rather was found in a half-inch-wide tube used to test the type of fuel passing through the Renton section of the fuel line.

The leaking gasoline sparked a fire that at one point unleashed 20-foot flames into the air and took 50 firefighters to douse.

The pipeline, which supplies much of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel for Washington and Oregon, was shut down by the company — not by federal or state regulators — while authorities try to determine just what occurred.

Yesterday's discovery of the leak answered only one question. Authorities still aren't sure what caused the hole, although they say the slim pipe may have been worn thin by rubbing against something. Nor do they know exactly how the fire started.

Olympic said that even after those questions are answered, the company plans to inspect other test pipes along the line to make sure they're not suffering from the same problem.

"Now we know at least what the source of the leak was," said Bill Kidd, a spokesman for Olympic. "That gives us more confidence about the checklist we need to be able to go down to be able to go through a safe start-up."

Kidd could not give a time frame for start-up, other than to say it likely will be before the weekend.

The pipeline, which carries 12 million gallons of fuel each day, is the only supplier for airplanes at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Bob Parker, an airport spokesman, said Sea-Tac has enough fuel on hand to last until tomorrow in the late afternoon or early evening. To conserve supplies, he said, "we're asking the airlines to have their aircraft fly in there with enough fuel to get to their next destination."
 
It isn't unusual for airlines to fly into Sea-Tac fully fueled if there is a cost savings in refueling elsewhere. But on long international flights, such "airline tankering" isn't possible.

Five years ago, the airport came within an hour of exhausting its fuel supply. That was after an Olympic pipeline ruptured in Bellingham in 1999, causing a fire; three lives were lost and the fuel line was partially shut down. At that time, while the northern portion of the line was closed, fuel was barged or trucked to petroleum refineries farther south before being piped to its final destination.

This time, there were no injuries. And the fuel spill — between 3,000 and 10,000 gallons — was much smaller than the 236,000 gallons that spilled in June 1999.

After that accident, the pipeline operators were fined $36 million and agreed to pay a $75 million wrongful-death claim to the families of two of the deceased.

"They're being extraordinarily cautious," Dave Lykken, senior pipeline-safety engineer with the state Utilities and Transportation Commission, said of Olympic.

Indeed, since the 1999 explosion, BP and Shell, which bought the pipeline, have spent "literally millions in doing internal inspections of the line and acting on the results of those inspections," said Kidd, the Olympic spokesman. "We have helped to define new technology."

The company has devices that look for corrosion, for example, or dents in the main pipeline. "The integrity of the line is not in question," Kidd said.

However, those devices can't be used in the garden-hose-sized test pipes.

In the days and perhaps even weeks to come, federal and state regulators, along with Olympic officials, will continue to investigate. And environmental agencies will assess the extent of the spill and oversee the cleanup.

"We're doing a root-cause failure analysis to make sure this doesn't ever happen again," Kidd said.

Maureen O'Hagan: 206-464-2562 or mohagan@seattletimes.com