When a gas company breaks pavement to replace old gas line pipe, the pipe is just part of the cost.

“When you’re doing this kind of work in the city, it’s slow and very costly,” said Ken Johnston, Peoples Natural Gas Co. vice president of operations.

Ancillary costs can more than double a project’s price tag. Municipalities require that utilities repave streets, replace sidewalks and inspect affected homes before reconnecting gas service and lighting gas-fired appliances. In Pittsburgh, add the cost of hiring city police for traffic control at hourly rates that can top $50.

It costs about $1 million to replace one mile of gas main distribution gas line pipe in the Pittsburgh area and nearly $10 million in New York City, according to the American Gas Association, an industry group based in Washington.

“It’s helping us in the eastern part of the city. When they’re done, they’re resurfacing streets,” said Guy Costa, Pittsburgh’s chief operations officer.

Peoples’ work in Swissvale this summer resulted in replacement of old sidewalks, said Peoples supervisor Bart Ryan.

The timing of a line replacement is something the company can control, Johnston said. But, “You also have the things where folks are working and they hit a gas line.”

Even if a strike doesn’t puncture the line, Johnston said, it can cause a weak spot that leads to a leak or break years later.

One such leak led to a March 5, 2008, explosion that tore apart the Plum home where Richard Leith, 64, was babysitting his granddaughter, Gianna Pettinato, then 4. The blast killed Leith and hurled the child 50 feet, breaking her leg.

Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board found a dent in the underside of the steel gas line pipe where it had cracked. Excavation records, the type of damage, and the amount of corrosion indicated a backhoe scraped through the gas line pipe’s coating about five years before the explosion — around the time a plumber and excavator worked on a nearby sewer line, the NTSB concluded.

Leith’s family settled lawsuits with two gas companies and two contractors for $2.9 million in 2010.

Source: triblive.com