Trans-Alaska Pipeline, another BP spilling business

The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which goes over Tanana River, carries about 650,000 barrels of oil a day, and is 800 miles long.

The pipeline has been here for 33 years, and there have not been serious problems regarding it: it survived an earthquake and even the six bullets shot at it by an insane person. There was another accident over the Memorial Day weekend, and people investigation its causes accused Alyeska, the oil company that manages the pipeline, of cutting maintenance and safety budgets. These cuts could endanger the safety of the whole pipe system, and if it would lead to a spill, it would probably destroy much of Alaska‘s fragile ecosystems before fixing it. Within the last six months, there had been a lot of little incidents that are related to the poor maintenance of the pipeline. The biggest incident was the shut down of the pipeline caused by the shut down of both the main power and the backup power, which occurred during a routine systems test at Pump Station 9, one of the12 pumping stations located between Prudhoe Bay from Alaska’s North Slope and the oil terminus at Valdez. Nobody from Alyeska even noticed, because Pump Station 9 was not supervised by anyone because of cutting costs on manpower. There was no power to control the oil flow, and the result was a tens of thousands of barrels of oil spill, which flowed in a capture tank, out of which about 5,000 barrels ended up leaking on the ground.

David Guttenberg, the Alaska state Representative who used to work as a construction worker for Alyeska, says that the oil company wants to move most of the engineers and safety experts from Fairbanks to the headquarters in Anchorage, far from any potential pipeline spill. One Alyeska source declared that year after year, maintenance and repairs have been postponed, and this will lead in the end to a cascade of safety and integrity problems which will hit the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The dominant partner in Alyeska that controls 46.3 percent of the budget is BP, and they are the ones that insisted on a drastic cost cutting. Mike Joynor, the Alyeska Vice President of Operations, declared that in spite of the fact that the company’s two most recent presidents have come from BP, there is no significant influence from the company, which is now concerned with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Alyeska declares that its maintenance costs are between the limits established by law for this type of industry and that is only natural that some maintenance items are postponed for the next year. Mike Joynor said the pipeline is safe, that he was not under pressure to cut costs and that they will move to Anchorage only the people that are already working in offices, not the engineers that are out on the field.