Thursday, 7 February 2013

Natures power

This is a quick post to reflect on the sheer power of flood waters. This is not meant to be a criticism of the CSG industry; ex cyclone Oswell caught a lot of people out and when you have to cross a flood plain and a heavy rain event occurs the proverbial can happen.

Photo sourced from Beef Central, Oswald leaves trail of delight and despair
 
This is a photo of 30 lengths 42 inch diameter gas pipes that were welded together across a flood plain at Calliope, inland from Gladstone, sitting on mounds of dirt in preparation to be buried. The wall thickness of these pipes are about 3/4 inch. Individually each pipe length weights about 4.4 tonne. Not only did the water shift the pipes across the flood plain but also kinked the pipe. 
 
That's right, kinked, there must have been an incredible amount of force in the water to do that!
 
The pipe construction company would know how much hydraulic force it takes to bend a pipe. They do come along with a machine to make up some of the lesser degree bends on the pipeline easement. They bend x amount of degrees then move along x inches to bend the x amount of degrees again. They keep doing this until the right size bend is created. They have to make it gradually and smooth because the industry sends "pigs" up inside the pipe for various reasons. 

4 comments:

  1. Calliope is just west of Gladstone, I told you lot we had some serious rain here, like around 1.5 metres! That's an incredible pic, Dale. Do you know which company it was? Santos/ GLNG had an article the other day saying their pipeline and Curtis Island site were ok after the flooding with no serious damage.

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  2. No I don't know which company. I learnt about it by word of mouth and then found this short reference to this event in the beef Central article. My hunch would be that it is the QGC project.

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  3. It was QGC's pipe. The pipe had also washed across a road & QGC had to send a crew out to cut the pipe to allow traffic to use the road.

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  4. OK thanks Dale. Pretty impressive. Would be good if I could get a pic somehow, not from Beef Central.
    Cheers
    JohnM

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