For some people, I would think going through "torment" with their wife might include honey dust, a peacock feather and handcuffs.

Larry,
Your experience is way outside of anything I see. Your experience is yours, and the destruction of your land is heartbreaking.

I worked on a natural gas transmission line a few years ago. It was handled much differently. Before any ground was disturbed, all property owners has been contacted, and I had copies of the easements. Pretty much like Pooka said--land is your to use or farm but no permanent structures allowed over the pipeline. After construction began, we had complaints from some landowners. The gas company went back and opened the checkbook to satisfy them. This gas company wants to be a good neighbor, so they go above and beyond. If landowners requested it, any timber we cut, was left for them. Any driveways we impacted were graded, and constructed better than they were before. Grass was established on all disturbed areas--even very $$ grass seed as required by the State in wetlands. Most grass/ lawns were far better after the pipeline than before. One gentleman had planted trees in one place over the ROW, and gardens over another. We had some discretion as to the exact alignment of the pipeline, and rather than rip out everything, he was allowed to choose which ( trees or gardens) we could save. We couldn't save both, but we gave him the choice, and worked to limit the damage. When we went thru horse pastures, we erected fences to keep the horses out of danger. When we graded, we were extra careful not to leave ruts or holes that could hurt the horses. Every pipe joint was X-rayed--welders were to be fired upon their 2nd bad weld--no one was, as only 1 bad spot on one weld was found and it was ground out and repaired.

I guess, the purpose is to counter the idea that your experience is the standard operating policy for all pipelines. I would urge you to take Pooka's advice and contact the proper authorities and make sure they are going a good job. Sorry you are having such a bad experience.

Pooka,

I truly and sincerely appreciate your knowledgable and thoughtful post. The problem is, I've been through most all of this with pipeline companies and have NEVER been treated as you describe.

Not long after my first pipeline experience in about 1990, on a wet, muddy, Winter day, bubbles were coming out of the ground above the pipeline. I'm no pipeline expert, but I strongly believe that bubbles are not supposed to come out of the ground above a pipeline. It took two months of calling, yelling and screaming to get them to even show up and then when they did they tore it all to hell and made a HUGE mess above where I had already done lots of work with a disk and box blade to smooth it out and had seed in place.

They fixed it and went off and left it. I disked, box bladed and reseeded.

The most recent escapade was a leak that they found in their flyovers which happened on the second pipeline as well, but the cleaned up after their work a little better that time.

The last time, they dug a hole to China and during that experience the ground was super muddy. I don't know how many hands they had working for them, but every one of them believed that they had to make ruts out to the hole with their own individual pick up instead of leaving their trucks at the road and riding together. The ruts were over a 1/4 mile all the way from the road to the hole. They drug over them a little with a disk after the ground dried up some, and then who do you think had to fix it back as it should be? Yep, little ol' me. Also on that one they ran their track hoe over a gate and totalled the gate. I rearranged my fence so as not to have to buy another gate for them to destroy next time.

Pooka, if you believe that they fix everything for the landowner and always tell him the truth, I'm sorry I have to say it, but you are quite naive.

Thanks again for the post. Next time, and I can GUARANTEE there will be a next time, I will TRY the Railroad Commission as you suggest, but I fully expect it to be a waste of a long distance call. They are probably in cahoots with the pipeline like every other govt. agency I've seen that deals with them.

how much property is it that you have?

This is a crappy situation, but-

A. you should be consoling yourself that ONLY some of your yard was impacted and some trees were knocked down to do this, plenty of people have had their houses razed for things like highways, not a buried pipeline that will be all but invisible in 3 years.
You are posting away about the heartache and anguish of having your lawn ruined and trees knocked down because of the memories and its sickening. Im sorry, but there are plenty of people in the world who don't complain half as much for situations 1000 times worse.
As far as bad things happening, this is extremely annoying, but its not like the oil company came in and drove a backhoe over your children, which is what you make it sound like.
If it was decided that your house was the place for a new highway, you would have lost that completely, and had to move.
Think of the entire TOWNS blotted off the face of the map and 100 feet down in a reservoir for water projects, how about some reflection on just how lucky you actually are.

B. What does this have to do with the president? That connection is tenuous, even preposterous.

If the president had failed to approve the pipeline, LB's gripe would have been that he's anti-business, anti-oil companies, anti-jobs and bent on destroying the economy. Go figure.

One of the requirements of the Texas RR Commission is that each company doing business in the state must have a local agent. This is someone who lives and offices and is a resident of the State of Texas.

If there are Criminal violations that is who is going to get locked up. And the RR Commission has to approve the agent so the company can not appoint some Ganghand.

My job became soooooooo much easier after this little rule change was put into place. Instead of bumping heads with a Manager who was trying to make a name for themselves by 'saving' money (also known as deferring a problem) all we had to do was point out that the RR Commission was asking questions and things would get more Professional pretty quick. Even when the RR Commission was not asking question we were not above saying that they were since in the end the results were going to be the same.

I have seen how what are known in the industry as Real companies operate and how Poor-Boy's do it. I worked for a Real company and we just fixed everything by throwing money at it. Poor-Boy outfits would come up with some very creative ways to meet the letter of the law without spending a lot of money, but they always put safety first.

And then there were what we called 'Jake-Legs' who were rather difficult to work with and prided themselves on it. Some of these Managers think they are above the law until they have a run in with it. One problem for companies that think they can fix anything with one phone call to the right people is that there are members of the Press hanging around the RR Commission office reading all of their enforcement efforts and all of them would love to pick up a story involving a politician pulling strings that would be to the detriment of the State of Texas.

By the way.... If you think the RR Commission EVER cuts ANYONE any slack then you are the one who is naive. If you do not contact them with your problems then you have only yourself to blame if the problems persist.