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The West Block’s
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Workers Making Inroads in State Governments

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New Program Aims to
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Au nord du 49° parallèle
Nouveau programme qui vise à aider les métiers pour recruter plus de femmes

IEC Minutes
December 2018

America's Underground Crisis:
Aging Infrastructure Brings Opportunity for Gas Workers

Beneath nearly every American city, a crisis is unfolding. While talk of America's crumbling infrastructure focuses on bridges and roads, ports and airports, below ground the aging pipe networks that carry natural gas to homes and businesses grow more dangerous by the day.

For decades, labor unions, public safety advocates and environmentalists fought to increase funding to quickly replace the oldest, most vulnerable pipes with little success. The Department of Energy released calls to action. Public service and utility commissions would approve funding to repair damage and hook up new customers, but most of the U.S. iron and unprotected steel distribution mains — some a century old — were only slowly replaced.

Then, in late summer 2010, an explosion ripped apart a neighborhood in San Bruno, Calif., just south of San Francisco. A weld on a 30-inch steel pipe ruptured and exploded, sending a thousand-foot fireball into the night sky. The pipe had been installed more than a half-century earlier.

Tragedy followed a year later in Allentown, Pa. — five dead, three injured. The cause: a 12-inch main installed in 1928. In 2014, a gas main break in East Harlem, N.Y., leveled half a city block, killed eight and injured 48. The gas main had been installed in 1887.

The tragedies focused attention on the potential catastrophe beneath many American cities and state after state, with the help of the Obama-era Department of Energy, began to fund multi-billion-dollar programs to accelerate replacement and increase hiring.

In many parts of the country where the IBEW represents gas workers, the result has been increased hiring and overtime for some of the best paid blue-collar jobs in the nation.

"We fought to get this funding and now we are seeing the benefit, for our customers and for our members," said Utility Department International Representative Chris Harris. "Good jobs, better safety. Everybody wins."

The Problem

Nearly half of America's existing natural gas infrastructure was built before 1960 and cast and wrought iron pipes were used extensively in those years. Wrought and cast iron are brittle and reactive. Like older plastics, they can crack and break from frost heaves or other ground movement.

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