While water is running black in Montrose near a Cabot Oil & Gas drill site, PVR Partner’s Hirkey Compressor Station in Washington Township, Wyoming County, PA had an emergency shutdown on Wednesday (12/19/12) around 8:30pm.
DEP Spokesperson, Colleen Connoly, stated “Their operators are at the station and reported (at about 9:45 p.m.) that the situation is under control and that they are working to figure out what caused the shut-down.” She doesn’t know if there were any loud noises with the shut-down.
The operators of the Hirkey station are PVR Partners LP, (changed from Penn-Virginia Resources Partners LP in August 2012). Per PVR, they have only been involved in the Natural Gas industry since 2005. Prior to that PVR has owned and leased coal reserves since 1882.
In May 2012, PVR purchased Chief Gathering, a midstream company. Chief Gathering was a subsidiary of Chief Oil & Gas, which in turn is a subsidiary of Devon Energy.
PVR also entered into a joint subsidiary deal with Aqua America to form Aqua-PVR. PVR is the majority partner in Aqua-PVR, owning 51%. You may remember Aqua-PVR as being at the center of the Riverdale Mobile Home Park evictions.
Chapin Dehydration Station
PVR also operates the Chapin Dehydration Station in Monroe township in Wyoming County PA. In September 2012 the Chapin station had an unscheduled discharge, and a second one this past November.
Supposedly, a “protocol” is now in place to notify residents and agencies when unscheduled discharges are taking place…..although residents may already know that an unscheduled event is happening from the jet engine roaring sound going on outside their homes.
No protocols seem to be in place to actually prevent such “unscheduled discharges” from taking place in the future.
Be sure to read A Frack-Fairy Tale
UPDATE 12/20/12 12:30pm - A spokesman for the company (PVR) says there was never any threat to public safety. The shutdown was caused when a circuit board failed, and one of the facility’s monitoring systems spotted a problem.
“The stations are designed to be fail-safe ” said Steve Milbourne, PVR’s director of investor relations, “If it can’t verify that everything is fine, it’s designed to shut itself down. There was no physical problem. ”
This compressor station had just been put online in October 2012 and Milbourne said there has never been an issue with it. PVR operates compressor facilities which deliver natural gas to pipelines in six counties: Wyoming, Lycoming, Tioga, Bradford, Sullivan and Susquehanna.
Needs Repeating: This compressor station had just been put online in October 2012 and Milbourne said there has never been an issue with it.
WOW! A whole 2 months on line and there never has been an issue with it……must be some kind of record to warrant that pile of puffed-up poop.
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Have you ever heard one of them admit public safety was at risk?