You are correct, excessive internal static pressure can make a pipe fail.
You can have a U-shaped vertical tube with a closed valve that keeps a height differential between left and right columns.
For that set up, fluid is not moving, therefore it has no dynamic energy, only potential and pressure.
After we suddenly open that valve, the volume contained between the two columns (the U of the arrangement) will be feeling a different amount of pressure between left and right ends or cross-sections.
That pressure differential will tend to naturally get balanced (due to energy loss through friction and turbulence), but it will give impulse to our volume of fluid initially inside the bottom of the U tube.
These additional links may help you:
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/press.html#ed
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/bercon.html