After the 1999 Olympic Pipe Line explosion, what could have been another tragic footnote in a long history of fatal pipeline accidents became the clarion call for change on the state and federal levels.
“People still look at Bellingham as when safety changed,” former Pipeline Safety Trust Executive Director Carl Weimer said. “There have unfortunately been worse tragedies since, but Bellingham was unique in the way it came together, unified with a strong public presence and achieved collective citizen activism.”
Even as the community began to assess and grieve the disaster that shook Bellingham on June 10, 1999, Olympic Pipe Line Co. was quick to call for the reopening of the pipeline, saying that SeaTac Airport desperately needed the fuel it transported from the refinery in Cherry Point.
[ Read more: Olympic Pipe Line explosion’s human toll, and the families’ legacy ]
Local activists, lawyers, medical professionals and neighborhood leaders met over coffee at Old Town Café and hastily organized the citizen group SAFE Bellingham.
“We said, ‘They’re trying to start it back up, and that’s stupid,’” Weimer said. “What does a community do about this?”
As a conservation nonprofit with operational structure, RE Sources took the lead for SAFE Bellingham, and Weimer, who was then the RE Sources executive director, started crashing press events hosted by industry representatives and drawing attention to the possible reasons for the pipeline failure.
The city, which held a pipeline right-of-way contract that Olympic Pipe Line Co. had allowed to lapse, stood its ground in not allowing business to resume as usual, and the nearly two-year closure ended up being the longest pipeline shutdown in history to that point.
Joining the chorus of calls for reform were the congressional delegation, the mayor and city officials, and even the governor. They were all “on message,” Weimer said — there was no disagreement that pipelines needed to be safer.
U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen remembers driving northbound on Interstate 5 in Seattle on June 10, 1999, when he heard news of the disaster on the radio, and he carried that memory with him to Washington, D.C. when he was elected to Congress the next year. Before taking office, Larsen attended the National Transportation Safety Board hearing on the explosion in the fall of 2000, where he was introduced as “the representative incoming from Bellingham.”
At another hearing on pipeline safety, when Liam Wood’s mother Marlene Robinson testified, she exceeded her five-minute time limit. The committee chair leaned over to Larsen to say that she was over time, but as Larsen said, “It was something people needed to hear. It underscored something D.C. misses a lot — there has to be humanity to policy.”
Larsen lamented the human cost of the Bellingham disaster but celebrated the speed with which the community acted to effect change.
Pipeline Safety Act signed into law
Only nine months later, on March 28, 2000, during a ceremony at Bellingham City Hall, Gov. Gary Locke signed into law the Washington Pipeline Safety Act, which allows the state to inspect and oversee intrastate pipelines.
In 2002, thanks to the power of a unified voice coming from government regulators, elected officials, environmental experts, concerned citizens and the grieving parents, Congress passed the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act that increased fines for negligent pipeline operators, improved pipeline testing timelines, added protection for whistleblowers and enhanced state oversight of pipeline safety.
Investigations of the tragedy determined that the pipeline company did not provide adequate oversight or inspection of the pipe construction; did not adequately test safety devices; and did not have operators monitoring the pipe at the critical moment on June 10.
Olympic Pipe Line Co. and its parent firm agreed to pay a record $112 million to settle all federal criminal fines and most civil claims against them, as well as $75 million to the families of Wade King and Stephen Tsiorvas in a wrongful death lawsuit and an undisclosed settlement with the family of Liam Wood. In June 2003, U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein directed that $4 million in criminal fines go toward establishing the Pipeline Safety Trust, a national public-interest nonprofit based in Bellingham.
With the cooperation of the nascent Pipeline Safety Trust (PST) as well as other stakeholders, Larsen has made pipeline safety one of his principal issues — he’s had a role in every bill that has passed since then.
Meanwhile, PST has established itself as a credible leader in the space, Larsen said. Recently the American Petroleum Institute (API) passed its own public engagement standard to ensure that stakeholders like landowners, tribes and local officials have a seat at the table in pipeline construction and operation. PST was invited to collaborate with industry representatives in drafting the standard. After more than two years of work, the standard was published in March 2024.
“I would have never imagined they’d go there, 20 years ago,” Weimer said about API. “They really have more sway in getting the industry to do things than the regulators do. I think that’s one of the heartening things for me, seeing that the industry has embraced this. The Bellingham tragedy comes up when they’re having those discussions.”
3.3 million miles of pipeline
Twenty-five years ago, 1.5 million miles of pipeline were running through the U.S. carrying hazardous materials. That number has more than doubled and is now at 3.3 million miles. It’s considered the safest way to move material, but, as Larsen says, “when things go wrong, they go really wrong.”
Despite the progress made in regulation and oversight, the incidence of accidents hasn’t decreased. In fact, 2023 was the deadliest year for pipeline safety in the U.S. in the last two decades — between March 2023 and May 2024, at least 23 people died from pipeline failure, current PST Executive Director Bill Caram told the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure during a hearing this May.
In December 2023, another Olympic Pipeline failure in Conway, a small Skagit County community, resulted in more than 25,000 gallons of gasoline pouring into an irrigation ditch and creek near an elementary school before the pipeline shut down. The leak didn’t happen during school hours and the fuel did not ignite, but Caram said the accident illustrated that “we’re not making progress on pipeline safety.”
“For all the progress the industry touts on technological advancements and safety management systems, we are not moving towards our target of zero incidents,” Caram said to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
In 2023 Larsen co-authored a bipartisan bill to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s pipeline safety programs through 2027. He hopes that process will wrap up by the end of this year or early next year, and said he wants to see more efficient and effective framework to advance the safety of energy infrastructure across the United States.
“As long as we have pipelines, I’ll be working on pipeline safety,” Larsen said.
At the same time, because the government is seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, recent federal infrastructure acts include investments and incentives for thousands of additional miles of pipelines in the coming years for hydrogen and carbon capture and sequestration. There are still knowledge gaps when it comes to transporting these materials, so PST has broadened its focus to help policymakers ensure that the deployment of hydrogen and carbon dioxide pipelines does not increase community safety risks.
“There’s still more to do,” Weimer said. “We’re not done, let’s not let our guard down.”
Julia Tellman writes about civic issues and anything else that happens to cross her desk; contact her at juliatellman@cascadiadaily.com.
