I think this article could have used a little more petroleum engineering explanation.

Gathering pipelines (or tie-ins as we call them in Alberta) travel from a wellsite to a production facility. This facility may serve 10 to 100 wells. Such pipelines are probably 3 kilometers long at best and usually 2" in diameter. They are not usually difficult to construct, and the industry regards building them as routine.

And there are pipelines from the production facility to a pipeline terminal. These pipelines are taken more seriously. They are under higher pressures and produce bigger volumes.

And then there are the real big pipelines: the ones that move oil and gas thousands of kilometers. They have even higher pressure and more volume.

True it is that gathering pipelines are not monitored as much as the bigger pipelines. However, in Alberta we too have few regulations. But if such a pipeline fails, the operator is faced with great fines. So there is incentive to conduct reasonable inspections and build them right in the first place.

After analyzing the data, FracTracker also found that a pipeline catches fire every four days and results in an explosion every 11 days, causing an injury every five days and a fatality every 26 days.

If this is true and 1/10 of these accidents occurred in western Canada, there would be a lot of hell to pay.