Safety is our number 1 priority

The site I’m working at is a natural gas compressor station just in California across the Colorado River from Arizona.  One third of the natural gas demands for the ENTIRE state of California flow through this station.  To say this is a critical location is putting it mildly.  The safety precautions that one takes when working around natural gas are quite interesting.  For example when trenches need to be dug for pipelines on site no mechanical equipment can be used.  Yes you read that correctly.  No front loaders, no dozers, nothing.  All the digging is done by hand.  Not just done by hand, but using only shovels.  They can’t even use a pickaxe if the going gets tough. The reason being the danger of hitting an existing line.  The crew I’m with dug several hundred feet of trench that way over a 3 month span.  On the opposite end of the spectrum natural gas crews routinely WELD on a gas line that is in operation, which is called hot tapping.  This is based on the idea that in order for fire to exist three things must be in place: fuel, an ignition source, and a spark.  With two of three there is no fire.  For example, you can create sparks all day in air and you get no fire.  Conversely you can run a gas burner all you want, but without the spark you don’t get the fire.  So what the welders do is weld on the line as long as there is no gas escaping.  This is difficult to imagine, but a spark in a line full of gas will not cause an explosion.  Sometimes safety comes in an unexpected way.