While driving to my station in the middle of the ricefields and crawfish farms of south Louisiana today, I’m running random thoughts.
One report on the news noted the fact that it’s a big hassle trying to get all those folks stranded by the “”OMG, Giant Ashcloud! We can’t fly!” incident from the volcano with the name none dare try to pronounce in Iceland. You see, if you think of the air transport system like one of our pipelines, it’s easy to understand. The transport system runs every day, almost at capacity. So does my pipeline going north in the winter and east in the summer. The system can only move “X” amount, be it passengers or million BTU’s of gas per day. If you shut the system down, you lose those days. You can’t get back the capacity you didn’t use. Sure, you can come back on line and throw every empty seat you have, but the best you get is “X plus a bit”, and when you’re trying to reduce a weeks’ worth of folks stranded all over the globe because a bunch of weather fairies in Great Britain went into full panic mode, well, it’s going to take a while.
That story has impact in much of modern society. We’re only a disaster, either real or perceived, from chaos. Take hospitals, for instance. Under present conditions, American hospitals can perform some miracles, keeping premature babies alive that in most other countries wouldn’t even be counted as live births. Our burn units can do miracles on a few dozen cases at most. Likewise our infectious disease care.
Throw a real big one at us, like a nuke, and people who’d survive if they were the only bad burn case to show up at a hospital will be triaged, medicated to die as comfortably as possible because no matter what you do, the pipeline will be at capacity, that “normal plus a little bit”, and most burn victims will live or die on their own. Change the disaster to some sort of virulent microbe, and people will be in equally bad condition, except the contagion will add the element of quarantine. There just isn’t extra capacity. We have enough pipeline for every day. We can do “every day plus a bit”. But we can’t make up for twice the capacity because that should have been going in the ground five years ago, and then it would have just sat there, and we can’t afford that.
Second thought, since my crews in south Louisiana, by and large, ALL have served time on offshore platforms: the tragedy of the recent Deepwater Horizon platform fire is real to us. The whole Gulf Coast offshore industry isn’t THAT big a bunch, and everybody knows somebody, and one of the victims was known to one of my co-workers. I’ve never worked on a drilling platform. Both of my little jewels are offshore compressor stations, doing the same thing to natural gas and pipes as my stations onshore do, except for that “forty miles from land” thing, and the “make your own electricity” thing, and the fact that you eat, sleep, rest and work in a multi-level steel maze where everything you need has to come in by helicopter or boat.
I and some of my reader friends here know what I’m talking about. You don’t set foot on those platforms these days without sitting through an obligatory safety orientation that details evacuation procedures, emergency alerting system, escape routes, etc. Still, there’s an awful lot of equipment packed in a very small space. I’ve been out there doing some work and felt like I was trapped inside the wreckage of several jungle gyms make of 24-inch pipe, and had somebody blown the “get the HELL out” whistle, me trying to get my aging carcass out of that maze would have made for a fine YouTube video. And my platform deals with pretty well defined conditions: Gas comes in at this much pressure, we pump it out at that much pressure, and we use big spinny things to do it. Unfortunately, DRILLING can have some dynamics that can change conditions rapidly, like hitting unforeseen pockets of high pressure gas or oil and then things go horribly crooked, and FAST. That is likely what happened on Deepwater Horizon. We may never know.
