CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The failure of a 24" pipeline buried in the 1960s led to a blowout followed by fire. The damage caused the breakage and expulsion of 20 meters of tube; flames reached 30 meters high. The break occurred at the edge of a high transit route, in the opposite site of a thermoelectric plant, and under its high-voltage lines. The sequence of events that led to the failure was identified after a thorough expert analysis carried out by specialists appointed by the Regulatory Agency, the pipeline Operator, and Justice. The break was a consequence of a fracture propagated from a pre-existing defect in the reinforcement weld toe of a 3" connection to a nearby village, that was made more than 20 years before. The preexisting defect propagated from small weld anomalies, due to external loads related to soil instabilities: removal of top soil for pipe recoating and flooding due to extraordinary rains paired with the recent construction of a highway that distorted normal water flows. Other lessons were learned in terms of the role of witness recounts. Even after root causes were technically established, the media persisted in early explanations of the event. The responsibility erroneously attributed to high voltage cables (in the ignition of the gas cloud) and the dynamic loads due to the route (as the cause of a pre-existing leak), were due in large part to the credibility given to initial descriptions by witnesses. Witnesses identified three events: (1) a noise associated with the blow-out, (2) noise and flashes associated with electrical arcing and (3) the final explosion of the gas cloud. Witnesses did not agree on the sequence of the first two events. The immediacy of the three events and the witnesses´ different places and distances from the blowout site justify the differences of time between their perceptions of light and sound.

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