City Blog

On Tuesday, October 15, 2019, a substantial fire ignited and burned for 7 hours at the NuStar Energy fuel storage facility in Crockett.  With the Kinder Morgan Tank Farm/Terminal located in Brisbane, this raised a lot of concerns in the community: Could the same thing happen here?  Officials from North County Fire Authority provided reassurance that Kinder Morgan and the NuStar facility operate differently.  For one, Kinder Morgan does not store ethanol in the quantity that the NuStar facility does.  The NuStar facility is also much larger, where the fire consumed 250,000 gallons of ethanol (which was only 1% of the affected storage container’s capacity).  The tanks in Kinder Morgan’s Brisbane Terminal primarily store gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and on-site capacity is much less than at the facility in Crockett.  

Another difference between the facilities is that the NuStar facility is tied to an oil refinery in Crockett; the Brisbane Terminal is not, as it is a storage and distributing facility, supplied via underground pipelines for distribution throughout San Francisco and the Peninsula.  According to the Department of Transportation, "Pipelines are the safest and most cost-effective means to transport the extraordinary volumes of natural gas and hazardous liquid products that fuel our economy."  The City of Brisbane has created a page dedicated to Kinder Morgan FAQs for the community to get more information about their operations, and inspection schedules  – North County Fire Authority has a response procedure in place to support and augment Kinder Morgan’s emergency response plan should there ever be an incident.  That FAQ page can be found at: archive.brisbaneca.org/kinder-morgan-faqs.
 

With PG&E's Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events this week affecting 30 counties in the state, many of us have been thinking about what we'd do and how best to prepare in the event our power is shut off.  As posted by our friends at KQED, we found this to be useful and wanted to share with the community:

One thing we would like to note is that in the event of a PSPS, the City expects to meet its customers’ water and sewer demands.  We do have standby generators at all of our water and sewer facilities, so you will continue to receive water on demand from our reservoirs, and be able to gravity flow sewer to our lift stations.

Lastly, if you don’t yet have an air purifier in your home, you may want to consider getting one now when they are readily available.  Be sure to get one that comes with a carbon filter as that is what will absorb the particulates from a fire.