The brief has been submitted to support the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the federal pipeline regulator, as it defends its new rule created after the deadly 2010 San Bruno Tragedy that killed eight people. The rule faces a legal challenge by the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America (INGAA) in the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Washington, D.C. [Mar. 4, 2024] – The rule, titled Pipeline Safety: Safety of Gas Transmission Pipelines: Repair Criteria, Integrity Management Improvements, Cathodic Protection, Management of Change, and Other Related Amendments was developed in response to the many Integrity Management (IM) weaknesses identified following the 2010 PG&E gas transmission pipeline explosion in San Bruno, CA. The blast and ensuing fires wreaked havoc on the Northern California community, killing 8 people, injuring 58, and destroying 38 homes.
IM refers to a system of risk analysis and mitigation that requires pipeline operators of hazardous liquid and gas transmission pipelines to identify all potential risks to certain sections of their pipeline segments, physically inspect those sections on an ongoing basis, and create a plan to mitigate those identified risk factors.
Federal regulators incorporated IM standards approximately 20 years ago after pipeline tragedies such as the Olympic pipeline failure in Bellingham, WA. This rule attempts to improve the regulatory program by incorporating lessons learned from pipeline failures and subsequent National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigations. PST strongly supports PHMSA’s ability to learn from failures to more effectively prevent future tragedies.
In its amicus brief, PST is providing concrete information to the court about the rule’s background, the NTSB’s recommendations to PHMSA, and the importance of how the rule addresses glaring issues with the IM system.
When final, PHMSA’s new rule will require all operators to incorporate common sense practices into operations such as:
• Threat identification through a comprehensive risk assessment
• Monitoring of those threats, such as corrosive constituents in transported gasses
• Incorporation of newly-gathered data into a risk mitigation program meant to reduce corrosion-related preventable failures
• The use of more conservative assumptions and repair criteria to avoid failures in situations where current technology does not sufficiently or consistently recognize threats such as cracks and crack-like defects
Following PG&E’s horrific failure in San Bruno, the NTSB recommended that PHMSA amend its IM regulations to address glaring problems that allowed operators to make operational, maintenance, and safety decisions about their pipelines with missing, flawed, or erroneous information. To address the NTSB’s recommendations, PHMSA drafted a comprehensive rule specifically for gas transmissions pipeline safety that was referred to as the gas “megarule.” The megarule was ultimately separated into three rulemakings identified as RIN 1, 2, and 3. At issue here is RIN 2. In its Dec. 2023 appellate brief, INGAA challenged five standards contained within the final rule as contrary to the cost-benefit analysis and a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice requirements.
“PGE’s failure in San Bruno revealed that gas transmission pipeline operators were making grave errors in crafting their integrity management programs. This proved deadly,” Pipeline Safety Trust (PST) Program and Policy Director/Counsel Erin Sutherland said. “To keep our communities safe and prevent future tragedies we need to ensure the finalization of this rule as is, even if it means increasing the industry’s costs.”
PHMSA rulemaking is subject to two sets of cost-benefit requirements: one under the Pipeline Safety Act and one under Executive Order 12866, which requires an economic analysis of every major rule reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget. While the additional analysis required of PHMSA does not mandate that the benefits of new regulations outweigh the cost, that is often how the industry and PHMSA itself views this requirement—making passage of new regulations difficult or nearly impossible in some areas.
“This rule has been a decade in the making,” Sutherland said. “Integrity management was never meant to remain stagnant — this rule is an appropriate recognition of the twenty-plus years of knowledge gained by PHMSA in how gas transmission pipelines should be managed.”
Pipeline Safety Trust is represented by Senior Attorney Hana Vizcarra and Senior Associate Attorney Adrienne Lee of Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.
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About Pipeline Safety Trust: The Pipeline Safety Trust is a nonprofit public watchdog promoting
pipeline safety through education and advocacy by increasing access to information, and by
building partnerships with residents, safety advocates, government, and industry, that result in
safer communities and a healthier environment.
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