A further comparison, the Trans Alaska Pipeline operated by Alyeska employs about 800 people directly and hundreds to thousands of contractors depending on the current work load.
http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/TAPS
I live in Texas. We already have the southern part of the K XL P that goes from Oklahoma to Texas. No problem. We have pipelines everywhere down here, under our yards, etc. When I got a new fence I had to call a number so that any pipelines or sewer lines or elec lines could be marked so the fencers didn’t dig into them. And we have hundreds of chemical company complexes up and down our coast! We have offshore drilling rigs just off our shore, I am 5 miles from the coastline. NO PROBLEM! yet the tanker trucks are a problem, much more dangerous than pipelines buried under the ground....
Call 811 Before You Dig. You can call 811 or www.texas811.org. Remember to call before you begin any project requiring digging.
I remember in the late 1960s environmentalists assured us that if TAPS was built Alaska would quickly become an oil soaked moonscape, all the caribou would be dead and that the pipeline would surely fail because of all the engineering problems. Forty years later NONE of these dire predictions have come true. The XL pipeline presents few of the engineering challenges of TAPS and will be like the scores of other pipelines beneath our feet for decades that have functioned without problems.