Introducing Pipeline Safety Trust’s “Monthly Incident Dashboard”

In 2018, the Pipeline Safety Trust released a project called the “Perp Walk of the Month.” Presented as a spreadsheet, the Perp Walk highlighted the worst monthly incidents in the three commonly-reported pipeline systems: Gas Transmission, Gas Distribution, and Hazardous Liquids. The original project chose the worst incidents by release size and presented them in a spreadsheet alongside high-level information about the incident.

This Dashboard picks up where the original Perp Walk left off. Renamed the “Monthly Incident Dashboard,” this set of tools offers one major difference from the original: users can decide how to rate the “worst” incident each month. On the bottom of the sidebar, users can select which of the following variables determines the worst monthly incidents: release size, damage cost, deaths, or deaths plus injuries. Above the Determinant selection, users can also focus on a specific system or change the month in question to find any specific complete month of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) data from January 2010 onwards.

The user selections in the sidebar determine which incidents will appear on the landing page, named The Latest. A brief summary of these incidents presents the responsible operator, location, and high-level incident information. User selections also carry over to the other tabs. On Repeat Offenders,users can see which operators landed on the “worst of the month” list most often. The table on this tab aggregates these worst monthly incidents and presents the data for these operators. Users can expand any given operator’s row to see each incident that was the worst of its given month.

The following two tabs, Monthly Map and Incident Plots offer new comparisons for each month of incidents. Both tabs show all the incidents in the selected month, so users can view these incidents in context. The Incident Plots tab goes one step further and adds a switch to view all incidents for a given calendar year, offering even more context to incident scale in that timeframe. Both tabs also feature tooltips, where clicking on an incident on the map or hovering over an incident in the plot will reveal more information about each specific point.

Finally, the Full Table shows each worst monthly incident from the start of the dataset to the present. The same high-level incident information from the original “Perp Walk” is displayed alongside the operator and location. The table is fully searchable and sortable by column, so if you’re wondering whether any worst monthly incidents occurred in your home state or due to a specific operator, that is entirely possible to uncover in this table.  

The dashboard works best on desktop devices, although most features are functional on mobile devices by using the external link here. On any device, the external link will open a full-screen display of the dashboard off PST’s website.