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gas line hit

7

730virgil

Well-known Member
tall kid just called a farmer near dixon il somehow hit a gas transmission line.
his supervisor is on the way to scene first reports 2 fatalities.
tall kid said a transmission line could be 900 psi
be careful out there with all the junk buried in ground it is a wonder this doesn't happen more.
call before you dig!
tall kid is an underground locator his job is to find water,electric cable phone lines.
i think finding water lines is maybe the safest one to find.
he can take 2 pieces of wire do water witching he has found a couple lines here for me plastic lines doesn't work
please keep these people in your prayers
 
I remember somebody hitting one with some kind of deep tillage equipment about 30 miles east of here back when I was a teenager. We could see the smoke all the way over here.
 
Calling before you dig doesnt always work either.. Folks place we called they marked the elect service line down the driveway.. Dont know what they are drinkin..I know it comes from the corner of property line along the lot line then accross. WAY OFF...

Another one ....infront of our business in town.. marked city water line.. and the boring crew hit it twice..LOL LOL when I asked wasnt it marked.. they said it was marked incorrectly... LOL and that was the main service line.. it was a gusher for about an hour.. couldnt get it shut off because didnt know which shut off went to that area.. tried a number of offs till they got it right..

Just be careful.. I see alot of "diggers" using a prod to stick down where they dig to see if it strikes anything..
 
One more thing to add.. When I built my place house, and outbuildings. I made a map using satalite photo.. and marked ALL the lines, water, elec, sewer.. even the ones I ran unground. Stuck on garage wall and will stay there after im long gone for next family to know..
 
Best locater is the backhoe! Was building a house one time and the backhoe operator didn't call for a locate. There was a gas line marker not to far from where he was digging. He hit a 2" line and ruptured it. There was a lady in the small town that was supposed to be in charge of the gas business. She came with a clamp to crimp the line but didn't want to get down in the hole to do it. Finally the backhoe guy did it. About that time the guys from the actual gas company that owned the line showed up. They were really upset that the guy had clamped off the gas. The right way was to dig up the line a safe distance back from the leak and clamp it there. Doing it in the hole by the leak could have caused an explosion when the friction from closing the clamp caused it to ignite so they said. Could have taken half the town with if it if would have blown.
 
Around here call before you dig is a joke, the electric service to my home I put in myself and know where it is, they marked it as going along the driveway where nothing is, apparently that's where it looked likely to go and they were lazy cause there is nothing there to pickup
 
My idiot neighbor borrower a john deere excavation unit from work Gues how he didn't call the the same 800 number and hit a 1 1/4 gas line. Beleave it or not it didn't blow up or burn his house down. The cops and gas company were NOT AT ALL HAPPY. Boy did the neighbor hood stink. Luky it was a windy day.
 
I can witch a plastic water line. Also worked for pipeline companies and they try hard to locate lines properly but if you know the line is there the only safe way is to expose the line before you dig. While exposing it you may notice it is 500 ft from where they marked it. That is to say, trying to actually find it and expose it may take a long time if it is not where it is marked.

Probing with a fiberglass rod or wooden dowel before every stroke of the bucket guarantees you will find the line with the stick not the bucket. It takes time, but I'd rather spend the time there than in the grave.

Another method is to weld a bar across the bucket teeth then bolt a piece of stiff rubber to the bar. It's still slow going but you'll not damage the pipe.
 
Last spring our phone line came down. The new line had to be buried.
Locate co. spent two hours trying to find the gas line. They finally
gave up and put up a sign saying not to excavate in the area until
the gas co. located the gas line.
A month and a half later the bury crew got tired of waiting and buried
the line.
The sign is still out there.

Steve A W
 
At one of my prior employers we sold locating equipment. A LOT of the mismarkings operator error. If you see the kid swinging the locator like a golf club if will be way off. You are supposed to move in a straight line like with a paint gun. That way the unit is correctly sensing the RF field from the line you are trying to locate.
 
A crew hit one in town on a Saturday a few years back. They were working with the hoe, all at once the guys shut down and got out of there. We were several blocks away and could hear the leak roar. A few minutes later the cops wizzed by and started knocking on doors...must be a gas line. The local utility didn't have anyone on staff that could shut it down(being weekend)...so had to call up to Green Bay, was over an hour till it got turned off.
 
I'm from Western Kentucky and our farm set on top of natural gas transmission lines and underground storage. Lots of little white posts with yellow tops. And oil wells. A long time ago the way I understand the story was back when everyone was farming with M Farmalls and A John Deere's one of the lines ruptured and everyone had to evacuate but you couldn't start any vehicles. Anything that was running was ok but nothing could be started. If I remember the story right people couldn't come back for about a week.
 
I think he means if you?re off,and hit what you were trying to avoid. I think some guys can witch more than just water.
 
Call before you dig always works. When you call you get a ticket number. If it's marked incorrectly by a locator you get to tell the utilities to take a hike and you remain debt free.

The one call system can protect the contractor also.
 
update on gas line hit 2 people were killed 2 others hurt.
it is said to be a 20 inch line.
tall kid said first reports the line was not marked one of the people involved lives about a mile away and should have know gas line is in the area
 
We had one blow out in near Laingsburg 30 years ago or more don't think it was tillage equipment as it was in the road right of way. We saw the fire at home and thought it was a mile or so away but it was actually more like 5. My mother was a school bus driver and was running a trip that night up to Pewamo Westphalia for a basketball game. They weren't very far out of P-W headed home when they saw it and expected to find a barn fire a mile or so down the road but it never appeared. They stopped at McDonald's (probably in St Johns) and they were told a natural gas line in Laingsburg blew up and took most of the city with it, so when they got back to town they were expecting to see everthing blow up or burnt down, it wasn't the rupture was out in a rural area and didn't take out any buildings
 
Helping a friend with a new housing development we found and unmarked unknowen gas line the hard way . It was a four inch plastic line from some wells . Nobody knew who put the line in were itstarted from or where it went and how to shut it off . myself i don't know how they put it in as no right of way was cleared as it was weaved around trees . We had to put in a forced main sewer line in from the lift station to the main some 4800 feet away and do a bore under and interstate then under a state four lane to the main . I went back and started the clearing for the forced main and i did not see any sings of a right of way . The engineering ferm had no knowledge of a gas line . BUT we found it with the track hoe less then three feet down . Nobody got hurt thank god , but repairing a live line was not fun . also i found a main communication line that was NOT where they said it was with the blade of a dozer . On that one we did call and the people came out a said it is HERE and i said Stick around and the second cut this huge black snake came rolling up off the blade , it was ten feet from where they said it was . Lots of arm flappen when it came rolling up lots of phone calls got CUT SHORT . And i was Well YOU SAID it was here NOT THERE.
 
Was just on the TV news, said it was just out of Dixon, 2 dead, 2 in bad shape. Said they buried a tractor pulling tile in, hooked another tractor on and hooked the line. News guy on TV said the gas line was about 5 feet deep, seems deep to be tiling but I don't know anything about it.
 
Ya,this one was over by Ithaca and looked to be between Sheridan and Crystal at the farthest.
 
When my uncle and cousin used to pave streets my cousin drove a steel stake into a gas line the locating company missed. It blew a small crater out of the ground and the crew took off running. There was no fire but they lost a lot of time standing around while the gas company did it's work.

Another time, when the bridge by my house was replaced the contractor or county, I don't know which one, called the phone company to locate the line. They called the wrong phone company. The company man came, sat in his pickup a long time looking at maps, then got out, stuck a flag in the ground, painted a circle around it and left without notifying the contractor about it. As I understand a flag with a circle around it signifies there is nothing buried there? Anyway, their signals got crossed. The contractor came, looked at the flag with the circle and promptly dug up the phone line but thought it was an old abandoned line. My phone went dead so I sauntered out to the contractor and told him they had severed my phone line. He got a worried look on his face and got on the phone. It didn't take long for the phone company to show up. I never did hear who had to pay the bill.
 
I was digging a foundation hole in a new subdivision, the jobsite super came to me on a friday late, (always a friday, right) and said the power company placed a above ground vault to close to the rec buildings door, " just load your excavator on the low boy and you can reach out move it 6 inches without unloading", I did and broke a 2 inch gas, I think he had it out for me,my bad.

Same day buddy of mine was installing a culvert on a county road,
big fiber was located and he pot holed for it, 2 feet either side of locate, he hit the fiber optic, they tried to charge him $275,000 a minute, never heard the outcome.

Just after we bought our RV park the county was installing a sewer line, they hit a unlocated fiber line, they had locates for everything else, standing there looking at it trying to figure it out 3 black suburbans showed up and sent everybody home, next morning it was business a usual, they were working between the coast guard station and the lighthouse.
 
......My phone went dead so I sauntered out to the contractor and told him they had severed my phone line. He got a worried look on his face and got on the phone. It didn't take long for the phone company to show up. I never did hear who had to pay the bill.
Click to expand...

Man, you have good contractors there. Couple years ago some guys putting a new street down the road from me cut the phone line for my house. I went down there and told them they must have cut the line because my phone was dead. They claimed they didn't know if they cut it and if my phone was out, I should call it in. I kind of looked at him with my mouth open a bit then decided to ask him how would I call it in when THEY CUT THE LINE! Later when the phone guy was out, I caught up to him and he said he found where they had hit it 4 times. They would not allow that many splices in that short of a stretch so they made the contractor replace ~600 feet of cable.
 
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was tiling for farmer this fall, said theres a 8" gas main coming from the next town, called locator, he came from 80 miles away to watchdog us. he located it said bout 4' deep, i said well miss it were going 24-30 inches. nope hand dig, never did find with shovel at 4'. farmer said years ago the commercial tiler hit it , thought it was a rock, backed up and hit it again before finding out it was a high pressure gas line! no boom
 
I retired in my 40 th year from a Company whom owns, operates, and maintains a major Natural Gas Pipeline. We had 1000 miles of 30" .375 wall...1000 miles of 36" and miles of 48" Looping.
Every 60 miles there was from 30,000 hp. > 50,000 hp. Compressor Stations to maintain line pressure, and keep the product moving. Typically the Inlet PSI at a Compressor Station was 575>675 PSI and the outlet was set a Max operating PSI of 936.
We moved 2 Billon cubic feet / 24 hrs.

Gas Line hit......I feel deep pain and sorrow for those any were near such an incident. I've witnessed such an event.I shall never forget it.

Bob...Retired Power Engineer / Gas Turbine specialty:
 
A friend owns a large excavating company does work for electric, phone and
cable companies. He says if they hit a major phone line with loss of
services charges ect, his insurance and all his assets are gone in 24-48
hours.
 
On one of my places there is a gas line right-of-way with 4 36" lines running thru it,no one but a complete fool would do anything in the ground over that line without
first getting the gas line people in there and getting the OK.
 
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