HOUSTON – After the pipeline fire in Deer Park, questions have been raised regarding the secureness of the pipeline area.

The fire was started after a vehicle came through a chain link fence, hitting a valve and sparking the blaze from the natural gas pipeline.

The Vice President for Energy and Innovation at the University of Houston, Ramanan Krishnamoorti, explains the challenges of keeping these facilities and equipment secure and what goes into it.

“Finding ways to secure all of these completely is a challenge and really understanding all the different sources of compromise are issues that we want to be able to assess,” he said. “One of the issues with many of these infrastructure is we need ready access to this for a variety of purposes. One is for maintenance and operation, one is for emergency service.”

Krishnamoorti said the Deer Park incident was a surprising one.

“This is a significant incident that perhaps we had not really truly contemplated, that there would be somebody whose vehicle would go through several sort of barriers and get to the point where it can go and impact a chain link fence and break it and then go hit the belt like, there are many other places it could have been if it got hit and gotten stalled out,” he said. “It is certainly something that we need to start accounting for. I think there are perhaps a few more barriers that could be put in place.”

Krishnamoorti said companies do risk analysis to determine how to engineer things to keep them as safe as possible, although it is never foolproof.

“You can never make anything 100% safe. What you try to do is do a risk analysis and you come back and say, what are the probability of of an event happening? What is the risk associated? And then put in countermeasures that prevent that give us the best economic result with the safety result that we’ve got in mind,” he said.