Dirty Details: Dents, Faulty Welds Found Along Keystone XL Southern Half in Texas

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If an ecologically hazardous accident happens to TransCanada’s Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline, we can’t say we weren’t forewarned.ย That’s the latest from a press release and YouTube video recently disseminated by the good government group,ย Public Citizen.ย 

Public Citizen‘s Texas officeย explained, โ€œDozens of anomalies, including dents and welds, reportedly have been identified along a 60-mile stretch of the southern segment of the Keystone XL pipeline, north of the Sabine River inย Texas.โ€

A recent report appearing inย The Houston Chronicle revealed KXL‘s southern half is over 75-percent complete and will be on-line by late-2013. That half of the pipeline brings tar sands – also known as diluted bitumen, or โ€œdilbitโ€ – from Cushing, OK (dubbed the โ€œpipeline cross-roads of the worldโ€) down to Port Arthur, TX, where it ends up exported to the global market.

KXL‘s northern half is still in its proposal phase. Its eventual fate sits entirely in the hands of President Barack Obama and his U.S. State Department because it’s a border-crossing pipeline. In March 2012, President Obama issued an Executive Order for expediting building of KXL‘s southern half.

Earlier this year,ย Tar Sands Blockadeย a group committed to creative non-violent direct action to stop the building of KXL‘s southern half – also detected defective welding in the pipeline, akin go that discovered by Public Citizen. The group did so when one of its activists went inside of the pipeline and discovered light seeping through it.ย ย 

Despite this new concrete evidence from both Public Citizen andย Tar Sands Blockade, the State Dept. recently denied Friends of the Earth-U.S.‘s (FOE) request to have its key Freedom of Information Act request expedited, one which would likely expose Big Oil’s influence over State’s KXL northern half decision. State argued the request doesn’t โ€œmeet any of the established criteriaโ€ for expedition, thoughย Public Citizen‘s latestย spate of findings showsย otherwise.ย 

Faulty Welding: Dirt’s in the Details, Detail’s in theย Dirt

An old adage goes, โ€œthe dirt’s always in the detailsโ€ one digs up. So too with this latest revelation byย Public Citizen – both figuratively andย literally.ย 

โ€œSome of the new pipeline has been in the ground on some ownersโ€™ land for almost six months,โ€ย Public Citizen‘s news release reads. โ€œLandowners are concerned that this digging is indicative of faulty pipeline along the route that could potentially leak and threaten water supplies, and have requested TransCanada and the U.S. Department of Transportationโ€™s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) to provide more information about theย work.โ€

The โ€œdirtโ€ in this situation was excavated not merely through landowner speculation, but straight from TransCanada’s ownย contractors.

โ€œThe anomalies and other problems were reported to landowners along the lineโ€ฆby several TransCanada vendors, including an independent inspector and a right-of-way representative,โ€ย Public Citizen further explained, also writing that each โ€œmarked section [has] a stake that readsย ‘Anomaly.’โ€

Photo Courtesy ofย Boldย Nebraska

โ€œAnomalyโ€ or More of theย Same?

Yet, is any of this really an โ€œanomalyโ€? Again, the โ€œdirt’s in theย details.โ€

As covered here on DeSmogBlog, the contractor hired by the Obama’s State Dept. to perform the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) – literally actually chosen by TransCanada on State’s behalf – has a sordid history of rubber-stamping pipeline projects as environmentally safe and sound even when they’reย not.ย 

Two key cases in point, both covered here onย DeSmogBlog:ย Environmental Resource Management, Inc’s (ERM Group) green-light of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Caspian Sea-area export pipeline project and ERM Group’s approval of the Peru LNG export pipeline project.

An Aug. 2008 Wikileaks cable discusses a BTC explosion in a mountainous area of eastern Turkey, which spewed 70,000 barrels of oil into the surrounding area. Cause of explosion:ย unknown.ย 

Peru LNG – akin to the case of the current southern half of KXL – wasย built with a faulty welding job via corroded, recycled materials from old Brazilian and Ecuadorian pipeline projects. It exploded five times in the project’s first 15 months of existence between late-2004 and Marchย 2006.

Isn’t Keystone XL โ€œImminent Threatโ€ to โ€œPhysicalย Safetyโ€?ย 

Despite the slew of evidence to the contrary, State determined FOE‘s FOIA request meets none of the expedited processing criteria, as seen in the key excerpt of its letter to FOEย below.ย ย ย 

Don’t U.S. citizens deserve to know how much influence the industry is having over a decision that will – if approved – aid in hastening climate catastrophe and cause ecological harm (though not according to the ERM/State SEIS) before the final decision isย made?

After all, climate change is threatening lives and physical safety of individuals around the worldย now and will only worsen as tar sands are extracted from Alberta and shipped to the export market at increasing rates. If anything is a plausible โ€œsubstantial humanitarianโ€ issue, climate change fits theย bill.ย 

So too are poorly-manufactured pipelines – such as the ExxonMobil Pegasus tar sands pipeline – which due to a bad welding job that caused a 22-foot+ gash, spewed over 200,000 gallons of dilbit into a Mayflower, AR neighborhood. The Mayflower tar sands spill threatened the lives and physical safety of people so much that 22 families were forced to leave their homes and two months later, still have not received approval toย return.ย 

Why the FOIAย Secrecy?ย 

The precautionary principle of science guides prong three of this expedition denial. That is, this information is a moot point a year or more after the pipeline is built and the damage is already done – and it can often take yearsย for federal bureaucracies to fulfill FOIA requests.

Though Obama campaigned to โ€œusher in a new era of open government,โ€ talk has proven cheap.ย ย ย 

โ€œWhen it comes to implementation of Obamaโ€™s wonderful transparency policy goals, especially FOIA policy in particular, there has been far more โ€˜talk the talkโ€™ rather than โ€˜walk the walk,’โ€ Daniel Metcalfe – Director of the Department of Justiceโ€™s office monitoring the governmentโ€™s compliance with FOIA requests from 1981-2007 –ย told Bloomberg in a Sept. 2012 article.

Bloomberg concluded the Obama Administration had โ€œflunked the disclosure testโ€ in his first term, calling into question the level of secrecy within a taxpayer fundedย government.ย 

โ€œI and many other journalists have observed that this administration, despite its public rhetoric, has repeatedly and continually been very difficult to deal with. I rate them worse than the Bush administration,โ€ David Kay Johnston, the head of Investigative Reporters and Editorsย (IRE) recently stated on Democracy Now! โ€œThey’re behaving much more like a corporation than like the peopleโ€™sย government.โ€

Johnston’s analysis is a fitting one, given FOE‘s FOIA was about corporate influence over State’s KXL looming northern half decision. The denied FOIA expedition request, of course, has little real legalย merit.

But because many former Obama and Sec. of State John Kerry aides now lobby for TransCanada, because Obama’s former Communications Director Anita Dunn does public relations work for TransCanada and because her husband Robert โ€œBobโ€ Bauer is Obama’s personal attorney, it’s obvious who calls the legal shots at the end of the day.ย ย 

The harder question to answer with this rapidly spinning government-industry revolving door: Who’s the corporation and who’s the government in this latest example of โ€œDemocracy, Inc.โ€?

Update:ย Check outย Public Citizen‘s video on the topicย below:

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Steve Horn is the owner of the consultancy Horn Communications & Research Services, which provides public relations, content writing, and investigative research work products to a wide range of nonprofit and for-profit clients across the world. He is an investigative reporter on the climate beat for over a decade and former Research Fellow for DeSmog.

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