Failures by SCC in buried pipelines

Until a few years ago there had been no record of stress corrosion cracking (SCC) as a main cause of failures in Argentine pipelines, but as the pipeline system became of a certain age this mechanism started to have an important impact on reliability. This study analyzes three blowouts attributed to high pH SCC in different oil and natural gas transmission pipelines, which occurred by the sudden propagation of longitudinal cracks at the outer surface of the pipes. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.