‘Virtual pipeline’ of gas tankers in Champlain Valley sparks concern

FERRISBURGH – On July 15, all that Jeanne Kelly and John Eisenhardt could do was watch from a safe distance as a tanker truck fire, burning more than 50 feet high, spread to a building on their property and consumed it. The first thought on their minds, Kelly said, was anguish for all the antiques inside, family heirlooms. The second was a question: ‘again?’

Twice in just over a year, a truck hauling compressed natural gas south on Route 7 stopped in front of Kelly and Eisenhardt’s property with a small fire starting in the brakes. In each case, the brake fire spread to the truck’s container and its cargo, triggering an emergency release of gas, which started an inferno that blazed for several hours and caused significant property damage.

Both trucks were part of Colchester-based NG Advantage’s “virtual pipeline,” a stream of container trucks that carry large tanks of compressed methane every day from a filling station in Milton to a paper mill in Ticonderoga, New York, traveling along Interstate 89 and several state roadways on their way to the Lake Champlain Bridge at Chimney Point.

The concept — pioneered by NG Advantage — is a handy solution for manufacturers without access to natural gas pipelines. But after two large fires, the practice is sounding alarms in some of the communities that trucks pass through.

“There’s a safety issue along the whole route,” Rep. Matt Birong, D-Vergennes, said in a recent interview. He said that he and several other local officials have been working together to find out more about the trucks, but that it has been difficult to determine who regulates them.

Annie Keller, Kelly and Eisenhardt’s neighbor across the road, recently recalled running for her life from the first fire as it spread onto her property in June 2023. An ongoing insurance battle over the damage from last year’s fire made this year’s fire all the more infuriating, she said.

“Everybody said, after the first time, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen again,’ you know? And I was in full agreement. Of course, it was a total fluke,” Keller said. “And then when it happens again, instead of, ‘Well, it’s never going to happen a third time,’ it makes you almost wonder more, ‘Why did it happen a second time?’”

“And now, is it going to happen a third time?”

‘Like getting struck with lightning twice’

On June 1, 2023, around 11:15 p.m., Keller and her teenage son John had just finished watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals when she heard a burst of rapid-fire car horns followed by a loud pop.

“I thought it was like a gunfight, like somebody had cut somebody off,” Keller recalled from her porch last Monday, pointing to where she’d heard the noises coming from on Route 7. “Never in your imagination would you think it’s a truck exploding.”

When she called 911, she found out that a truck with a brake fire starting in its rear axle had been waved down by passing cars. The pop had been a tire. Just as she and John went out to look, the fire suddenly got much worse.

To prevent a catastrophic explosion, the tanker’s emergency release valve had activated — letting out all the gas in the trailer, which caught fire as it vented several stories into the air.

Keller said she and John ran, she in her gardening slippers and he barefoot, to the neighbors’ yard and then even further. “The explosion was so big,” Keller said, “our house looked like a little dollhouse in front of it.”

The fire burned for several hours before first responders could confirm it would not spread to Keller’s house. It ultimately scorched several trees, damaged the asphalt and both her and her neighbors’ yards and totaled both the tractor and the trailer, but thankfully, nobody was injured.

Just over a year later, on July 15, Keller got a call from her neighbor Kelly, with whom she’d gotten close since the first fire. It was happening again, Kelly said, 75 feet from where the first one caught fire.

Keller didn’t believe it. She said she still almost can’t believe it.

“If you think about it, it’s like getting struck with lightning twice,” John said. “It’s the craziest thing.”

Luckily for them, the wind was blowing west this time, away from their house. Not so luckily for Kelly and Eisenhardt, it was blowing the fire directly toward a building at the front of their property, which they were using as storage for antiques at the time.

Kelly said she watched the fire reach the front of the building, then the roof, then completely engulf it. Eventually first responders had to bring an excavator and collapse the structure to help the fire die out more quickly.

“They knocked down the walls one at a time. They were really careful about it,” Eisenhardt said. “Before they even started, they asked where the most valuable stuff was. And at that point, it really didn’t matter.”

This time, the driver was taken to the hospital with injuries, the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles reported in a press release . The fire again damaged both yards as well, and tore through power lines.

Like Keller, Kelly and Eisenhardt said they hadn’t been aware of the gas tankers driving past their home every day until the first fire tore up their yard. At that time, they did research on NG Advantage and the virtual pipeline model. When the second fire hit it only confirmed to them that it wasn’t something they wanted passing by their home.

‘Beyond the pipeline’

As of 2020, Vermont had the least gas pipeline mileage of any state in the continental U.S., according to a VTDigger review of pipeline data from the Energy Information Administration . Currently, pipelines extend only as far as Middlebury coming south from St. Albans and the Canadian border.

Planned expansions to the pipeline network in the state have been met with protests , including the latest extension to Middlebury from the Burlington area. Vermont’s pipeline network is managed by Vermont Gas Systems.

Founded in Colchester in 2011, NG Advantage has offered its “virtual pipeline solution,” according to its website, “driven by the desire to equal the competitive playing field for Vermont manufacturers without access to pipeline natural gas.” It was the first U.S. company to bring a virtual pipeline to market, it said in an announcement at the time , but since then, several competitors have started offering the same services.

Since its founding, the company has expanded throughout the Northeast, with filling stations in Milton as well as Pembroke, New Hampshire and Springville, Pennsylvania. At a filling station, natural gas is extracted from a pipeline and compressed into cylinders that are loaded onto trucks for delivery to “manufacturers and institutions beyond the pipeline,” according to the company’s website.

NG Advantage and its parent company, Clean Energy Fuels, did not respond to multiple requests for comment and did not answer emailed questions about how many truckloads of compressed gas leave their Milton plant daily and what routes they take.

In 2015, VTDigger reported that NG Advantage sent gas to 24 sites across the region, with 18 truckloads alone being delivered daily to a paper plant in Ticonderoga. The company said then that it was making routine shipments of gas to three locations in Rutland, with the intention of phasing out that virtual pipeline when the Vermont Gas extension was completed. The extension to Rutland was the third phase of Vermont Gas’ plans and has been in limbo since the second phase, Middlebury to Ticonderoga, was scrapped in February 2015 .

That extension, which would have gone under Lake Champlain to Ticonderoga, would have delivered natural gas to the Sylvamo paper mill, which initially offered to finance most of the project but backed out when costs rose significantly. In April of that year, Sylvamo (then International Paper) signed a contract with NG Advantage to receive the 18 truckloads of compressed natural gas daily, with the potential to increase that number. Both trucks that caught fire in Ferrisburgh were headed for Sylvamo, according to authorities.

NG Advantage contracts with shipping companies whose tractors carry its trailers — the company only owns two vehicles and employs one driver of its own, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. KAG Merchant Gas, an Ohio-based shipping company, was the shipper in both Ferrisburgh fire incidents and numerous KAG trucks were observed leaving and returning to NG Advantage’s Milton facility by VTDigger in the last week.

As a safety measure, NG Advantage trailers have special emergency release valves on the top that allow each cylinder to rapidly dispel the compressed gas into the atmosphere if it heats up to a certain temperature. The gas is released in order to prevent a rupture in one of the cylinders which would cause a much larger explosion, potentially catastrophic to the truck and its immediate surroundings.

The emergency release valve worked as planned in both Ferrisburgh incidents, in response to fires spreading from an axle, according to Gene Cote, captain of the Vermont DMV’s safety and enforcement division, which investigated and wrote reports on both fires.

“The emergency relief valve operated properly and vented natural gas from the cargo tank. The commercial vehicle and trailer sustained extensive damage,” Cote wrote in a statement to VTDigger.

‘It puts an alert in your eyes’

Both fires burned several stories high for more than two hours, according to the neighbors, and the Vermont DMV reported that six different fire departments responded to the scene last month. Eisenhardt praised first responders but also noted that it was lucky it happened in such a sparsely populated area.

“The first thing everybody that has a brain says is, good thing it didn’t happen in Vergennes, right? They would be two days fighting that fire,” Eisenhardt said, adding that a lot more people could have been hurt.

On the way to Ticonderoga from Milton, NG Advantage gas tankers pass through Colchester on I-89, South Burlington, Shelburne, Charlotte, Ferrisburgh and now New Haven on Route 7, and Addison on Route 17.

Before July, the NG Advantage route to Ticonderoga turned onto Route 22A and passed through the center of Vergennes, before turning onto Route 17 and crossing Lake Champlain at Chimney Point. When Vergennes mayor Chris Bearor saw the second fire, he said it sounded the alarm in his head.

“I picture having that truck in a populated area, doing the same thing it’s been doing on Route 7,” Bearor said. “It puts an alert in your eyes.”

Bearor and several other local officials began looking into the company and its virtual pipeline through the area shortly after the second fire. According to Bearor, NG Advantage decided to alter its route before the officials reached out with their concerns.

“They took it upon themselves to take Route 17,” he said, avoiding Vergennes and turning instead at New Haven Junction. Bearor said he appreciated the company’s recognition of the concerns.

At the same time, he said, he doesn’t see that as the end of the road for his safety inquiry.

“We’re not going to let this live down. We’re going to figure out a solution for everybody,” Bearor said, “including all these towns that they’re going through, not just Vergennes.”

Birong, the state representative for the area, said that he has been working regularly with Bearor as well as the city manager and fire chief of Vergennes since the second fire. He said that they have met several times to discuss the dangers of the trucks driving through Vermont communities, as well as the many unknowns that remain.

“I’m encouraged that the company took a proactive step,” Birong said of the rerouting. “At the same time, I want to learn more about their safety and inspection protocols before they get on the road.”

‘The agencies aren’t on top of it’

When Eisenhardt made calls to several state agencies after the first fire, he said, the responses he got were concerning: Not much seemed to be known about the safety issues with compressed natural gas tankers, or about the practice at all.

“Nobody had an answer for who was doing a major investigation,” he said.

Similarly, Birong said he has found in his research that avenues for regulation in Montpelier are constrained.

“We really haven’t identified anything we can do at the state level,” Birong said.

In New York and Pennsylvania, where NG Advantage and other gas trucking companies have in the last five years operated major virtual pipelines, the apparent lack of regulation has also been a big issue, according to Ron Barton, a former hazardous material truck inspector and activist in New York.

“These things are not regulated, the agencies aren’t on top of it,” Barton said. “‘We’re aware of it’ is all you hear from them.”

According to the Vermont DMV’s Cote, investigations into both incidents have been a cooperative effort between the Vermont department and two federal agencies: the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

The FMCSA has primary oversight over commercial trucking companies that transport compressed natural gas, while PHMSA prescribes rules and regulations for the transportation of hazardous material, PHMSA spokesperson Bruce Nilson told VTDigger in an email. The latter agency authorizes the transport of compressed natural gas via truck trailer through a special permit process. The permit requires that companies follow specific rules regarding container materials, the design of the trailer and its fire protection system and the regular inspections of both, Nilson said.

When an incident occurs, PHMSA requires the company or companies involved to submit an incident data report. Following that, the agency may participate in an investigation and issue findings that would require specific changes to a company’s practices, Nilson said. However, the agency cannot comment on ongoing investigations, he said.

“This investigation (into the recent fire) is being led by local Vermont authorities and information about the cause of the incident and subsequent enforcement actions will be released once the investigation is complete,” Nilson wrote.

FMCSA did not respond to repeated requests for information.

In a public database of the required incident reports, NG Advantage has filed seven such incident reports since 2013, not including the second Ferrisburgh fire, for which reports had not yet been filed as of Friday.

In its report about the June 2023 fire, NG Advantage detailed actions it was taking to prevent recurrence.

“Investigation is ongoing. Our carrier, KAG, has done refresher training with all drivers on pretrip inspections and we have performed a safety ‘blitz’ inspection of all trailers in the fleet to ensure everything is in order,” wrote Paul Sweitzer, director of transportation for NG Advantage. Sweitzer did not reply to VTDigger questions by phone or email.

KAG Merchant Gas Group, in its filing on the same incident, did not list any actions it was taking to prevent a recurrence.

‘No determination of liability’

KAG reported to the PHMSA in the incident report that the first fire had started in the rear axle of the trailer, which is owned by NG Advantage. As such, when Keller made her insurance claim for the many trees she lost, KAG denied liability.

In a letter reviewed by VTDigger, KAG’s insurance company, Illinois-based Gallagher Bassett, wrote to Keller in November that “the correct entity responsible for this loss and damage to your property is NG Advantage and their carrier is Nationwide.”

But in a letter dated several weeks earlier, Nationwide had told Keller that NG Advantage was not liable, either, because there was “insufficient information” and that “the cause of the fire could not be determined.”

Although the Vermont DMV’s investigation into the incident concluded that a mechanical failure in the trailer’s rear axle had started the fire, Keller said the two companies have still not resolved which of them is liable. She recently hired a lawyer, 14 months out from the incident, to reach a resolution.

“A nightmare is what it was,” Keller said. “Weeks of my time wasted.”

Kelly and Eisenhardt said their insurance claims related to the first incident were never resolved either, with both companies pointing fingers at the other and neither paying for any of the necessary restorations.

“‘We can’t figure out who’s responsible, so nobody’s going to pay,’” Kelly said derisively, pulling the two letters she received from the companies out of a folder of truck fire-related papers.

This July, when the fire started in the tractor’s axle, she said that KAG agreed to compensate them for the damages to their storage building, which was a complete loss. Of course, it has been impossible to estimate the value of the many family heirlooms lost in the fire, she said. But it has still been less of a headache than the fallout from the first fire, for which Eisenhardt said they’re still pressing for accountability.

“It’s not the amount of money that’s the point,” he said. “The point is, they’re driving these things down the road, denying their liability when there is an accident. And that is not acceptable.”

Correction: Earlier versions of the captions to the photographs accompanying this story incorrectly described the building damaged in the July 2024 fire.

Read the story on VTDigger here: ‘Virtual pipeline’ of gas tankers in Champlain Valley sparks concern .