‘Nothing changed’ says Olympic pipeline victim’s parents, after 5th leak in a year
By Chris Daniels, KOMO News (Dec. 4, 2025)
“What we don’t want to see is this just being a cost of doing business, but the fines really aren’t meaningful relative to earnings,” said Pipeline Safety Trust Executive Director Bill Caram.
“He also suggested that many of the incidents weren’t deemed “significant” until 2023, and that the size and frequency is a concern.”
“We have this cluster of incidents in just a couple years, and it’s time for us to be asking questions,” said Caram in an interview on Thursday.
Good comments. How many people remember 1969 Santa Barbara oil leak? I saw it in person, looking out of a restaurant window.
How many people remember the San Bruno CA natural-gas-line explosion over a decade ago ? It took 60 to 90 minutes to shut down the line. You should look up that one in Wikipedia.
And now, look how long it took to shut down the liquid fuel line locally?
How many people realize that a pressurized natural gas line goes from the main line coming down from Canada out to the LNG processing and storage facility on the Tacoma Tideflats? How many people know that an earthquake fault runs directly under the Tideflats? How many people know that beneath the Tideflats’ sea bottom and down to the bedrock is 1500 to 2000 feet of silt rated as most-likely soil to liquefy in an earthquake for the Puget Sound area? It took 60 to 90 minutes to depressurize that gas line in San Bruno, and the prediction for an earthquake on the Tacoma Fault is now up to being predicted as a Magnitude 7.2 quake…and on a fault nearly directly under the PSE LNG facility being fed by a pressurized gas line like the one in San Bruno CA was.
What is within the projected blast radius of an explosion from the PSE LNG operation? One recent report that came out recently put the blast radius at five miles from the facility. What is within five miles of the facility? What if the pressurized line itself breaks apart when the soil on which the pipleline sits collapses into the Sound while pressurized? What kind of fire will that create? (Think of San Bruno and Loma Prieta in 1989