The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) indicated last week that it was entering the final stages of its investigation into the cause of the August 2000 explosion on the El Paso Natural Gas South Mainline system that killed 12 members of two extended families in southeastern New Mexico.

The NTSB expects to issue a report either later this month or in June that will spell out the “factual information” surrounding the deadly blast, said spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz. The report, which will be “many hundreds of pages thick,” will not identify the cause of the explosion, he said, but it will serve as the basis for that finding. A final report on the cause “will be just a few months after that.”

The board’s preliminary investigation at the time of the accident suggested that “significant internal corrosion” may have been a “contributing factor” in the fiery blast (Daily GPI, Aug. 25, 2000). Then-NTSB Chairman Jim Hall, who had toured the site of the Aug. 19 explosion near Carlsbad, NM, also said the nearly 50-year-old pipeline segment that ruptured “had never been inspected with an internal inspection tool or hydrostatically tested in all that time.”

The Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) had called it the worst natural gas pipeline disaster in the United States. The 12 dead were members of two local families who had been fishing and camping alongside the Pecos River in New Mexico. They were consumed in the blast and fireball that ripped open an 86-feet wide, 20-feet deep trench and left a mass of twisted metal pipeline. The explosion had interrupted gas transportation service on the three lines that make up El Paso’s South Mainline for weeks and months afterward.

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