Life on the Gas Pipeline Super HighwayGrand Prairie, Texas

Take Cover - This is Just the Beginning (Video no longer available.)

Click here to read the story. (5.8.18 ~ Here's a link to another story from that same time period.  The WFAA story and video are no longer available as you will see if you click on the video above and on the link.  Here's an alternative story with a summary of that WFAA story from 2010:  The Star "Telegraph's" Blog Story. Not to be confused with the Ft. Worth Star Telegram.)

This is part of the huge gas gathering system going in all around Grand Prairie. It's coming to a neighborhood near you. If you see a road being torn up and a sign that says, "Utility Work Ahead." That's it. We're just part of the gas highway. Maybe it's like a "Trail of Tears"...people will suffer and die along the way. And all the misery will be explained away as unfortunate accidents. The gas operators hope you don't figure this out.

In Grand Prairie, for example, the current Gas Drilling Ordinance does not require a gas drilling permit to provide details about gas compressors (necessary to get the gas to market) or gas pipelines associated with the drilling site. Really, to be fair, the State of Texas doesn't either. It's an unregulated free-for-all.

To Grand Prairie residents living near a pipeline construction project at Arkansas Lane and Highway 161, the equipment and activities had been little more than an eyesore.

Until last Friday, that is, when a device called a "pig" — being used to pressure test a pipeline under construction — was launched like a missile out of the end of a pipe, straight toward a house 500 feet away.

As the photographs provided to News 8 showed, it was a direct hit — right into Robert Heredia's bedroom.

"It looked like a war zone in here when it hit, it was really bad," Heredia said.

He and his wife were not at home at the time, but his daughter Christina was. While she was in another part of the house, he realizes the incident could easily have had tragic consequences.

"If it would have been 20 minutes later, she probably would have been in here getting ready to go to work," Heredia said. "That's what gets me as a dad... you know what could have happened." [emphasis added.]

Reading the comments attached to this article, it's clear that people have no idea what is going on. Many of the comments are chastising Mr. Heredia for the possibility that he might "sue." Hmmmm. I wonder who really made all those comments? And even the article states that the pipeline construction was "little more than an eyesore." Little more?

There is nothing "little" about any of this. It's HUGE.