https://medium.com/stories-that-matter/406a9f0d4166

The environmental scandal that’s happening right beneath your feet
Uprising: Winner of the 2013 AAAS Kavli award for online science journalism

BY THE TIME BOB ACKLEY crossed the Harlem River into Manhattan he’d been up for nearly four hours. It was still dark, not yet seven on a Sunday morning: the best time of the week to go sniffing for gas.

The back seat of his hatchback was littered with hi-tech equipment. Plastic hoses and cables connected a web of instruments: a laser spectrometer, a computer, GPS equipment, a pump, and a fan. The jumble of gadgets purred reassuringly as he drove.

Few people understand the streets of America’s cities the way Ackley does. He’s spent almost three decades documenting leaky gas pipelines and alerting utility companies to potential danger. Now he can read the street like a hunter reads animal tracks; some academics call him the “urban naturalist”.

As he drove through New York, Ackley looked for the signs that could point to possible gas leaks. Wearing a tattered winter jacket and peering out from beneath a baseball cap that proclaimed “Life is Simple, Eat, Sleep, Fish”, he searched for spray-painted signs that mark underground pipes and wires.

He watched the weather, knowing storms bring low-pressure systems that draw gas up from underground. Small holes drilled into the pavement; long narrow patches of asphalt; dead grass on the side of a street: these are all good indicators of past — and perhaps ongoing — leaks.

Even so, the Manhattan streetscape was hard to read that December morning. Concrete and asphalt ran from building to building without a blade of grass in between.

The only escape routes for gas were manhole covers.

“I’ve never had such a hard time pinpointing leaks,” Ackley said. “It’s as tight as a bull’s ass.”

Cheers Ms Spock for that.

Not sure of gas, but based on experience with some other thing I can say under-read at low flows at consumer meters can distort the picture some. You know like a meter might have a +/-spec for some flow range, and say some 20mm meter (example only) might drop below the 3% accurancy range under 150ml/min. It drops of more steeply as it gets lower to the point it will pass water without any measurement. These are given Q figures if I recall. As they age and the displacement unit and ‘cylinder’ get worn they are worse, but that’s for water that has grit in it. Under-read error for all flows is what you’d look at.

The thing is though the end-user under-read is quite handy for hiding losses in the distribution system. Then there are the faulty meters. Of course the utilities would do figures adjusted for under-read error.

Anyway, unaccounted for methane losses were the subject. Quite likely much higher than acknowledged I would guess.

Thing about finding all those leaks is there’s a lot of finding and digging and repairing involved, very costly and it makes a mess, and when you do find a leak it could be that the pipework is all near needing repair, or long stretches.

Some under-read back at the supply is handy for hiding leaks too.

transition said:

Thing about finding all those leaks is there’s a lot of finding and digging and repairing involved, very costly and it makes a mess, and when you do find a leak it could be that the pipework is all near needing repair, or long stretches.

Some under-read back at the supply is handy for hiding leaks too.

Interesting transition.

ms spock said:

transition said:

Thing about finding all those leaks is there’s a lot of finding and digging and repairing involved, very costly and it makes a mess, and when you do find a leak it could be that the pipework is all near needing repair, or long stretches.

Some under-read back at the supply is handy for hiding leaks too.

Interesting transition.

Yes, no one wants the extra costs.. Hide the evidence.

At some point ‘repairs’ become ‘upgrades’ and even ‘replacement’, doing it can cause inconvenience to traffic both vehicle and pedestrian, and in some areas in economic decline the money wont tend to go there anyway.

It’s a bit like ‘civilization’s incontinence’.