Edison, New Jersey gas pipeline explosion

Brief mention as a counterpart to molten-metal hazards — 1,000 PSI / 42-inch pipeline failure producing 600-foot flames over Edison NJ at midnight. Cited to make the point that high-energy industrial failures are rare but dramatic.

So these types of hazards exist, and they do kill people, a few people every year. It's sort of like a coal mine — we probably kill 50 or 100 miners a year. It doesn't really hit the news because it's one of those things that happens. It's like gas pipelines. We have gas pipelines all over the country, and some of them have 1,000 PSI gas in a 42-inch diameter pipe, and usually when one blows up it's in some farmer's field and it kills a couple of cows. A few years ago we had one in Edison, New Jersey — 600-foot flames shooting up in the air, like a 60-story building in the middle of Edison, New Jersey at midnight, woke a few people up. So failures occur and they can be pretty dramatic, but fortunately they're not very common.

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42-inch diameter pipeline, 1000 psi, laid in 1960s through then-farmland. Let go in the 1990s after suburban buildup. Flames 600 ft in the air; radiant heat melted neighboring roofs.

Forty, fifty years ago they were only distributing it at 1,000 psi. About twenty years ago I worked on the Edison New Jersey pipeline failure. It was a 42-inch diameter pipe, transporting gas at 1,000 psi. When they first laid it in the 1960s through Edison New Jersey, it was farmland. By the 1990s, when this thing let go, it was more built up — all of northern New Jersey is just a big suburb of New York. When it let go, there were flames shooting 600 ft in the air from a 1,000 psi 42-inch diameter pipe. The radiant heat just melted the roofs of the buildings next door. But that's another story.

Tom's consulting case 15–20 years prior. Backhoe damage 1/4" deep, fatigue crack grew over years, catastrophic release produced a 600-foot flame at 11 PM; radiant heat melted apartment building roof next door.

The problem is, people still come along with the backhoe and dig it up, and then all of a sudden you have a catastrophic flow which can be explosive. Most of the explosions are not due to slow leaks — they're due to some big break. That's what this article says: the cast iron pipes are a problem. Why? Cast iron pipes are brittle. All of a sudden you get catastrophic breaks and release huge amounts of gas. I had one in Edison, New Jersey fifteen, twenty years ago. The question was, was it ten years before or twenty years before — a backhoe had damaged the pipe about a quarter of an inch deep, and just the pressure cycles had caused a fatigue crack. When it finally got to critical flaw size, the whole thing went, and they had a 600-foot flame in the air at eleven o'clock one night.