CHARLOTTE — Meghan Arnold and Steve Woytasczyk were startled awake in their bed to a deafening roar. It sounded like a jet plane taking off in their living room.

It was shortly after 5 a.m. on March 1, 2016, and Woytasczyk went to find the source of the noise. Arnold gathered the couple’s children: Kali, 4, Reese, 2, and Stevie, 1, at the time.

As Woytasczyk opened their front door, a powerful sulfur smell smacked him in the face. He looked around and saw a strange substance raining down from the sky.

“It literally looked like someone was holding the world’s biggest can of WD-40,” Woytasczyk said recently. “Just a solid mist … a solid fog.”

A diesel mechanic who has worked on oil field trucks and equipment, Woytasczyk knew what the smell and the mist meant: An Energy Transfer Partners natural gas pipeline running through their property had burst, spraying deadly hydrogen sulfide gas and raining condensate upon the couple’s home.

He knew they had to get out.

Back inside, Arnold was hunkered down with the children in the bathroom. Woytasczyk screamed to her above the roar.

“I’m going to go outside and move the truck,” he recalled telling his wife. “If I drop out front, don’t try and go and get me. … Take the kids, get in the truck, go as far down the easement as you can.”

He sprinted back outside, jumped in his truck and moved it close to the front door. The family piled in and peeled out in the yard, running over their barbecue pit and small mesquite trees as they drove onto the strip of pipeline easement only 130 feet from their house.

They drove north, away from the sound and the smell, until they reached the edge of a neighboring property. A neighbor opened the gate and let them through.

They were safe, for the moment.

Pipeline at least 70 years old

In the months after the rupture, the family sued Energy Transfer Partners and its construction contractors, GTO Construction and Shafer Project Resources, for negligence. They also made claims of neglect, nuisance and trespass against ETP, a publicly traded Fortune 500 company headquartered in Dallas with $1.2 billion in gross profits in 2016, according to NASDAQ.

ETP officials did not grant interview requests. In an email, ETP spokeswoman Alexis Daniel said the “company disagrees with what has been represented” but did not address any specifics.

“We do not publicly speak about current or pending litigation,” Daniel said in her email. “We look forward to working through the legal process regarding this matter.”

In state district court filings in Atascosa County, all three companies denied the allegations.

Work had been done on the pipeline as recently as three months before the break, satellite photos indicate. Seven months after the rupture, an inspector with the Texas Railroad Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, wrote on what likely caused the break.

“The cause of the rupture was determined by metallurgical analysis to be the girth weld has cracked and fractured,” an inspection report states. “Contributing factors may have been the overloading by external downward force caused by a misalignment during the construction phase.”

Public records and media reports indicate that the pipeline is at least 70 years old, 16 inches in diameter, made of steel and coated with fusion-bonded epoxy to protect against corrosion.

In 1957, Transco, a major pipeline operator in South Texas at the time, wanted federal go-ahead to add more miles of pipe to its gathering system serving the oil and gas fields between San Antonio and the coast, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

That system included the West Big Foot Lateral, a line that transported gas from the West Big Foot formation, a natural gas play in Frio County. Over the years, the lateral became part of a network of gathering lines, referred to as the Tilden Gathering System.

A federal filing by Regency Energy Partners, a one-time owner of the West Big Foot line, describes the Tilden system as “a large integrated natural gas gathering and treating system located in McMullen, Atascosa, Frio and La Salle counties in South Texas.” It funnels gas to a processing plant outside Tilden in McMullen County.

The line has changed hands five times over the past 16 years, according to Railroad Commission filings. That’s a typical situation for pipeline systems in an age of mergers and consolidations.

Pipeline operators Williams, Enbridge and TexStar Field Services owned it between 2001 and 2006, when it was purchased by Regency Field Services, according to records. In 2014, Regency merged with Energy Transfer Partners.

No safety regulations

In the lawsuit, the couple’s lawyer claimed that ETP staff told Arnold and Woytasczyk in the fall of 2015 that there were at least 19 “anomalies” on the pipeline in need of repair, including two on their property.

Google Earth photos from December 2015 indicate that ETP was having work done on the line at that time. The images show construction equipment, white trucks and pipeline workers excavating sections of the line south of Arnold and Woytasczyk’s house. It also shows recently disturbed dirt over the area where they say the pipeline ruptured.

In populated areas, work on oil and natural gas pipelines must be done according to minimum federal safety standards. These cover pipe materials, welding procedures and the qualifications of the people doing the work, among other regulations.

But the work on the pipe running through Woytasczyk’s property was done without any kind of safety standards or oversight by state or federal regulators.

That’s because it’s a rural gathering line, used to transport oil, gas or natural gas liquids from the wellhead to a midpoint, such as a processing station.

Federal and state regulators rank pipelines by proximity to people, from classes 1 through 4, depending on population density. The most rural class, Class 1, has 10 or fewer homes within 220 yards of the pipeline’s center.

No safety regulations, state or federal, apply to Class 1 gathering lines, Railroad Commission spokeswoman Ramona Nye confirmed in an email.

Out of the nearly 449,000 miles of pipeline in Texas, nearly 173,000 miles are Class 1 gathering lines, according to the commission.

When building new pipelines, most reputable companies nowadays build their lines to meet federal standards even if they’re not required to, said Don McCoy, an independent consultant and former federal pipeline regulator who has also worked for pipeline giant Williams Partners.

But that’s less often the case when companies repair sections of decades-old lines rather than replacing them entirely, he said.

“The field is probably playing out, so they probably wouldn’t be making capital investments on that,” he said.

Dream house in the country

Arnold and Woytasczyk had no idea that they would be living next to an active pipeline when they bought their property just south of Charlotte.

Arnold is a sharp-witted 25-year-old who speaks with a Louisiana twang. Woytasczyk, 35, was born in San Antonio. The couple met while she was an office worker at his former employer.

In 2013, they were living in a neighborhood near Calaveras Lake in South Bexar County. He worked his mechanic’s job, while she stayed home and took care of the kids.

They knew what they really wanted was a true country lifestyle — a nice one-story home far from the city where they could hunt and relax.

Soon, they had found the ideal spot: 27 acres off County Road 344 a few miles south of Charlotte. Deer and bobcat lurked in the scrub brush and mesquite, and their well pumped clean groundwater. They took out a mortgage and closed the deal in 2015.

Arnold said they had asked the previous owner about what they thought was an abandoned pipeline easement that extended past the ranch gate at the edge of the property. At the time, it had no signs or other markings to indicate it was still in use, she said. Small mesquite trees grew on the strip of land.

Soon after the purchase, they started laying out blueprints for the house and took out a bank loan to finance its construction.

Woytasczyk, his dad and other family members poured the concrete slab themselves, waiting almost six months for it to settle before starting work on the rest.

When they found out that Arnold was pregnant again, they scrapped their old plans and added another bedroom.

As the home was nearing completion, they learned for the first time that the pipeline was still in use. ETP workers had come to talk to them in fall 2015, saying they were doing repairs on the line.

They struck up a neighborly relationship, Arnold said.

“They’d bring me doughnuts,” she said. “Stop, talk, come ask how the kids were. Things like that.”

The house was mostly finished by late 2015. They had only lived there about eight months before the pipeline ruptured, an event they still refer to only as “The Incident.”

Official response

With the roar of the pipeline in the distance, Arnold got through to 911 on her mobile phone. Dispatchers sent the Charlotte Volunteer Fire Department to the scene.

She also got hold of an ETP employee, a man she had spoken to before, telling him, “Your (expletive) pipeline blew up.”

“They said, ‘Where?’ and ‘Get the hell out of there,’” she said.

Looking back on it, the man’s reaction baffled Woytasczyk. He figured they would have known where the break happened.

“From my understanding … this stuff is monitored,” he said. “I mean, there’s somebody checking those gauges, pressure readings and all that stuff every so often. If there’s any fluctuation, you shut it down, figure out what’s going on.”

At 7:45 a.m. that day, the San Antonio office of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which responds to pollution-related emergencies such as this, was notified by Atascosa County emergency management, according to a TCEQ investigation report. It was 10:30 a.m. by the time a TCEQ investigator named Lillian Butler arrived.

By then, the rupture had been contained, the report states.

State records indicate that Arnold, Woytasczyk and their children were exposed to multiple different substances that day.

When it leaves the ground, natural gas is composed mostly of methane — the most simple hydrocarbon — a highly explosive but nontoxic gas. It also includes small concentrations of a cocktail of other hydrocarbons — ethane, butane, propane and more — known as condensate, which can be harvested for fuel or chemical manufacturing.

For most natural gas formations, the mixture also includes hydrogen sulfide, a highly corrosive, poisonous, flammable gas that smells like rotten eggs and is formed when microbes break down ancient organic matter.

During the rupture, the pipeline spewed an estimated 4,200 pounds of hydrogen sulfide, 7,600 pounds of sulfur dioxide and 77,502 pounds of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, according to a TCEQ follow-up report.

After walking around a half-mile radius using a hand-held air quality meter and finding no dangerous levels of air pollution, Butler went back to the office. But she soon returned after hearing Arnold’s concerns about whether her home was safe.

Butler and another TCEQ staffer, Jeffrey Seiler, brought monitors to record hydrogen sulfide and volatile organic compounds. They measured low levels of hydrogen sulfide and VOCs.

More precise measurements taken using a canister sampler showed elevated levels of several different chemicals, but none above levels the TCEQ considers harmful over the short term.

Neither the TCEQ nor the Railroad Commission found that ETP or its contractors violated any state laws or regulations.

Health problems

In the days after the rupture, Arnold noticed that something seemed off with her children. Reese slept for a day and a half afterward, while Kali and Stevie experienced uncontrollable diarrhea and vomiting, she said.

They also felt strange, physically. Arnold said her eyes burned and she had a headache.

“I guess the best way to describe it, we felt drugged,” she said.

At first, the family had trouble finding qualified medical help in San Antonio. Nobody seemed to know anything about exposure to natural gas-related chemicals, Arnold said.

In the following months, doctors diagnosed all three children with pneumonitis, or inflammation of lung tissue, according to doctors’ reports that Arnold showed the San Antonio Express-News.

Four months after the rupture, doctors said the children were improving, though chest X-rays still showed “abnormalities.”

Arnold said the children’s X-rays have since returned to normal, though she’s worried that they may have a higher chance of developing asthma in the future.

As a mother, the effects on the children deeply trouble Arnold.

“I am a stay-at-home mom, and it’s my job to protect my kids from the monsters outside,” she said.

Financial problems

Not much is left of the family’s dream. The home is mostly empty, though the care they put into it was still obvious during a visit to the house in August.

They offered seats on their couches and bottles of water. They pointed out their carefully chosen kitchen and bathroom tile, a compact water heater that fits into a tiny space above the kitchen.

Arnold ran her hand along the rounded edge of a granite countertop alongside the kitchen — she didn’t want it to be sharp, in case the kids smashed their heads into it while playing.

“There’s a lot of family value here,” Woytasczyk said. “We came together to build this.”

There were also lingering signs of the chemicals that washed over their house. Strange circles were etched into some of their windows. Door handles that looked new on the inside were corroded and dull on the outside. Hinges were rusted, and a 2-year-old bolt on their outdoor hose looked rusted and crumbling, like it had been there for decades.

“Every time it’s dewey in the morning, we can smell it again,” Woytasczyk said.

The couple’s troubles mounted in the months after the rupture. They weren’t sure if their home was safe, but they assumed that ETP would help them make things right.

“I thought they’d come out and see what needed to be done and basically take care of what happened,” Woytasczyk said.

ETP officials offered to hire a housecleaning service for them, they said, but the family was not able to find one that would agree to clean a house affected by a ruptured pipeline.

They ended up doing the cleaning themselves, with the advice of industrial hygienists hired by the couple and the Texas Farm Bureau, from whom they had purchased farm and ranch insurance. The hygienist told them to thoroughly clean their ventilation system, Arnold said.

In May that year, their homeowner’s insurance company dropped them, they said. A claim with the Texas Farm Bureau was denied.

Eventually, ETP officials stopped returning their calls, they said. The days of doughnuts and small talk were over.

“When something like this happens, you’re no longer a victim, you’re the enemy” in a company’s eyes, Arnold said.

Their mortgage lender, Falls City National Bank, has intervened in the lawsuit to sue both the couple and ETP. The bank argued in an August legal filing that the home is now worth less than what they owe on their mortgage.

Since the lawsuit, Woytasczyk has had trouble finding work in companies that serve the oil field. The couple weren’t able to hold onto the new trucks they had purchased after damage left them uninsurable, Arnold said.

The two stressed multiple times that they don’t want sympathy. They’re interested in telling their story in the hopes that it might help others.

“This isn’t about sympathy for us,” she said. “This is a problem, and we need to deal with it.”

bgibbons@express-news.net | Twitter: @bgibbs