The Obama administration, responding to last week’s deadly explosion of a natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, Calif., proposed legislation Wednesday to strengthen federal regulation of pipelines and increase fines for the most serious violations.
The proposal comes as investigators continue to probe the cause of the Northern California blast that, authorities say, left four people dead and several more missing.
Under the Obama bill, operators of pipelines involved in accidents that cause deaths, injuries or very serious environmental harm could be fined up to $2.5 million, more than double the current $1 million maximum penalty. The administration’s plan also calls for hiring 40 new safety inspectors.
Congress passed a law in 2002 that required utility companies to perform risk assessments for pipelines in densely populated areas within two years of the bill’s passage, and then again every seven years. In fact, the San Bruno pipeline that ruptured on Sept. 9 was inspected last year, though no major problems came to light.
Yet with utilities conducting their own inspections, the work is loosely regulated. That is something the administration bill seeks to address through, among other things, increased federal monitoring of pipelines that have not been subject to U.S. regulation.
Experts also say that safety threats stem from the nation’s aging network of pipelines. The San Bruno disaster, for example, involved a 54-year-old pipeline, which is about the typical lifespan of a steel pipeline.
Carl Weimer, executive director of the advocacy group Pipeline Safety Trust, says the problems are widespread.
“In reality, there is a major pipeline incident every other day in this country. Luckily, most of them don’t happen in populated areas, but you still see too many failures to think something like this wasn’t going to happen sooner or later.”
The San Bruno blast also highlighted problems with the valves used to shut off pipelines. The Wall Street Journal reported that the Pacific Electric & Gas took almost two hours to manually cut off the natural gas that was fueling the inferno, which has led to calls for automatic valves to close a pipeline’s supply in case of a rupture.
