I began working in earnest for the Trust two years ago. Recently, I received a phone call from a timid citizen looking for support as he tried to educate himself in the midst of a pipeline construction project coming his way. He asked this question, and it offered me a brief opportunity to reflect on our work.
Do you remember 1999? If you lived in Bellingham, you know exactly where you were on June 10th of that year. Exactly where you were when an ominous and huge mushroom cloud rose into the clouds from the fireball that occurred after a 16” pipeline ruptured in a city park, sending a quarter million gallons of gasoline down a salmon creek, and subsequently igniting and causing an enormous explosion. Three kids died. Kids died and a salmon stream was wiped out because of negligence, poor management, lack of oversight and near nonexistent regulations.
So we remember. Sixteen years later, we remember these kids, and think about the 252 others who have died since 1999 in pipeline tragedies. We remember this disaster, and think about the 4,476 other significant pipeline incidents that have happened since 1999. It’s not easy to keep these issues on the forefront, especially when the oil & gas industry spends $141 million in a single year lobbying to keep their perspective on top.
We are not anti- or pro- pipelines. We are pro-safety, and work to make pipelines safer so human and environmental tragedies can hopefully be averted. Our board is very careful about where Trust funding comes from, and has been wise in investing the original endowment in a way that still makes our work possible.
In the Trust’s early years, it was difficult to access any information about pipeline safety. Now the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has a good website with more information than we can easily digest. We annually glean and assess the transparency of each state’s pipeline safety information, and hope that through this we push the bar higher and encourage more and more information about pipeline safety to be easily accessible to people who are affected by pipelines.
Our website too has grown, and offers a wide variety of information, tools, and educational materials to anyone looking for it.
Part of our work is asking questions and bringing up difficult issues so they can be talked about openly, as we try to do every year at our conference that draws about 200 people from the pipeline industry, the federal and state regulatory community, and every-day citizens or local government representatives who care about these issues and how they impact their local community. The kinds of in-person public conversations that occur at our conference do not happen anywhere else; it’s a unique opportunity for diverse stakeholder discussions about pipeline safety issues.
Other things we have accomplished and on which we continue to work:
- Improve federal pipeline safety regulations by testifying before Congress and commenting on proposed rules.
- Provide increased access to pipeline safety information.
- Provide a “public interest” voice to pipeline safety processes and at a variety of meetings.
- Serve as the public voice to the media looking into pipeline safety incidents and rules.
- Partner with groups trying to move pipeline safety forward.
- Provide technical assistance to impacted communities.
If you are affected by oil and gas pipelines, I hope you find the Pipeline Safety Trust helpful, join us in pushing the safety bar upward, and have confidence that what we provide is truly credible, independent, and in the public interest.
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