On December 5, 2017, 59-year-old Rory Miller and his son, 30-year-old Ryan Miller were killed when a buried KM gas pipeline exploded in Lee County, Illinois. The farm workers were attempting to free a tractor that got stuck laying field tile and inadvertently struck a buried 20" (508 mm) diameter natural gas pipeline. The explosion was on Kinder Morgan's Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America, a 9,200-mile (14 800 km) long system that transports natural gas from Texas and Louisiana to Chicago. Kinder Morgan issued a "force majeure" notice on the pipeline indicating a “third-party strike” as the cause of the explosion.