Posted on 11/12/2006 9:01:46 AM PST by thackney
Steve Williams' home in Scotlandville, La., a working-class neighborhood north of Baton Rouge, sits on the shoulder of a pipeline superhighway. Nine Exxon pipeline posts, carrying a laboratory's worth of chemicals, lines his fence. "These pipes shouldn't be near someone's home," said Edith Williams Pride, his daughter.
So, tell us, why did you build there?
(You can't use GPS when navigating in the S. Pacific, because many of the charts are 100 plus years old.)
The witness posts are installed at the same time as the pipeline, so they are accurate unless somebody has torn them down. The clear cut and the concrete will also give you a clue . . . Everybody knows where the pipelines are, it's just the map that is now "off" due to increased accuracy. The example given seems like exactly that sort of problem, given that the track is pretty accurate, just off to one side.
And this is a pretty tony suburb, so there's no question of putting the pipelines where the race card is. This is just where the pipelines have to run to cross the river.
It is amazing that a company transporting explosive fuel would do less.
That's a different matter from the pipelines in OK/TX/LA. The pipelines coming into Atlanta are on a large scale, put there mostly so they could offload onto trains. Atlanta's pipelines are to the ones further west like interstate highways are to surface roads.
During the heyday of black fiber, a friend flew the route from New Orleans to Houston following an abandoned pipeline they considered purchasing for right-of-way.
It would disappear in the swamps, reappear 1/2 mile from where it should be, and be in pieces due to storm damage. Seems like it was built in the 20's or 30's.
Never could trace it well enough to consider purchasing it.
They did see some huge aligators, snakes and a few gentlemen that waved them off with superior firepower. Some snakes in the swamps have legs.
I'm wondering which was there first, the house or the pipeline...
CSX main line runs just west of our subdivision.
. . . there's no way anybody could miss one of the pipelines around here.
I imagine computers and GPS have helped enormously in that regard.
And, as mentioned earlier, the biggest problem is probably still legacy data - some of the existing infrastructure is literally from the 19th century.
A lot of it dates from the 1880s . . . and in some cases lines have been completely lost as streets were moved and buildings constructed.
A very old (brick vault) main drain line collapsed during a heavy rainstorm a couple of years ago and a couple of strip mall buildings and the entire parking lot of the Marriott Hotel at 14th and the interstate fell into the sinkhole. Amazingly, only two people were killed.
More recently, a brick vault line collapsed over on the east side of town and swallowed up an entire block of a residential street. They had no record of it and didn't know it was there.
But that's just typical for the corrupt and incompetent city administration.
That's huge, although for property maps, cadastre maps, before digital maps and GPS it is typical. They can map down to 20 feet now, but finding existing, old plant is expensive.
NYC cant even map its subway tunnels.
Sounds a lot like my office.
A thought -- larger pipelines use "pigs," basically a plug forced through by liquid or air pressure, to separate one product from another, clean and check for leaks. Could a pig be engineered for the smaller pipelines, with either GPS to log its location as it passes through or a beacon that could be tracked from the surface or air?
You could build a basic electronic unit the size of an iPod, and then embed it in a foam or plastic sabot custom-made for each pipeline. They do it on Mythbusters all the time.
Yes, it can be done. A helicopter with magnetometer might be quicker. The data must still be processed, but modern GPS data can go straight into the GIS. All the coordinate conversion software imaginable is already built in.
As to pipelines, they have to cross many areas, and it's almost impossible to avoid all areas where people live.
I made a call once where a construction crew ruptured a six inch gas main. We arrived on scene, verified the incident, and called in the gas company. The gas company rep showed up and told me I didn't know anything about pipelines, that there wasn't anything larger than 2" in the area. I told him to check it and he found out it WAS a six inch gas main. I don't know about the guys like Exxon, but the local gas companies have no clue where the pipelines are, and love to hang repair costs on companies that rupture them. This is after the companies have verified with the gas company that there aren't lines in the area.
Atlanta only exists because it was a transportation hub -- the original name was "Terminus" because it was built as a rail hub. Early locomotives had a lot of trouble with steep hills, so the lines were built for a slow climb from the fall line to Atlanta, and then ran along the ridge lines so there wasn't a lot of vertical change. The two main hubs were at Terminal Station, under what is now the CNN Center/Philips Arena/Georgia Dome area, and Union Station, near the site that is now Underground Atlanta.
Both areas got raised viaducts in the early 20th century, to get pedestrians out of the noise and smoke of the trains. All the retail businesses in the Union Station area constructed new facades and storefronts on the second floor, and the old entrances were abandoned and neglected -- and therefore left unchanged -- until the first Underground development in the '70s.
Sorry if this is boring, but I've always been fascinated with Atlanta history. Like most cities, most of the interesting stuff just sort of happened by accident.
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