Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman

Author:Daniel Schulman [Schulman, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2014-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

At 3:09 p.m., in the dimly lit pipeline control center at Koch Industries’ Wichita headquarters, an alert flashed red on one of the six screens Danny Mills was monitoring. This was the nerve center of the company’s pipeline system, where a bank of computer consoles, arrayed in a semicircle, displayed the constantly updating vital signs of Koch’s 40,000-mile network, which Charles and David had built over the last few decades into one of the largest in the nation.

The pressure in the Sterling I pipeline had dropped to zero. It stretched 570 miles, from Medford, Oklahoma, to Mount Belvieu, Texas. Unknown to Danny Smalley and most of his neighbors, it ran within several hundred feet of their homes, coursing with a thousand barrels an hour of highly volatile liquid butane. (The clear gas is used to fuel cigarette lighters, as an aerosol propellant, and is also blended into gasoline and propane.)

The pressure reading couldn’t be right. A malfunction, Mills assumed. Perhaps one of the transmitters that relayed data back to the control center was on the fritz.

Twenty minutes later another alert blinked on his screen, this one showing abnormally low suction at a pumping station. Mills beckoned a coworker over, who peered at the monitor. “It looks like you have a problem,” he said.

A ringing telephone interrupted Mills as he tried to diagnose what had gone wrong with Sterling I. On the line was Rick Burgett, a former Koch contractor who happened to live in the same subdivision as the Smalleys. “You have a major leak in this area,” Burgett told Mills.

A few minutes later, Mills was on the phone with the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office. He needed to get a technician out to the site immediately. “This is Danny with Koch Industries. The pipeline that ruptured, I need to know where this place is.”

After being transferred a few times, a dispatcher finally gave Mills directions to Oak Trail. “You’ll see it when you get there. They said that the flames are about 200 feet.”

“Flames?” Mills started to panic; he thought there was just a leak.

“Yeah.”

“What caught fire?” he asked.

“It’s a gas main broke, blew up,” the dispatcher said.

“Good God.”

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