A legislative showdown is shaping up in Congress over pipeline safety one year after a gas line explosion in San Bruno, Calif., killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, bills have been introduced in the House and Senate that would repeal a longstanding grandfather clause that shields operators from having to pressure test lines installed before 1970.
They aim to close a loophole that allowed Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the utility that owned the ill-fated San Bruno pipeline, to avoid testing it for the type of welding flaw that contributed to the Sept. 9, 2010 rupture. The San Bruno line was built in the 1950s.
Those two bills square with a call by the National Transportation Safety Board, an advisory body, for federal requirements for older pipelines whose safety hasn’t been verified to be tested for potential weaknesses.
But a new bill, introduced last week by Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., would keep in place the grandfather clause in the federal pipeline safety law that permits the older lines to go untested. The bill also would block other proposed safety reforms.
Last week a spokesman for Shuster, who chairs a key subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, brushed aside the safety board’s testing recommendations. “The NTSB makes those recommendations without concerns for the economic cost,” the spokesman said. “That is something we have to take into consideration.”
Industry officials have defended the grandfather clause, which still shields tens of thousands of miles of the nation’s oldest gas pipelines from pressure tests that could detect weaknesses. They have cited the cost of examining older pipelines and the disruptions that would be caused by taking pipelines out of service for several weeks for the testing.
The Chronicle said that a key industry group, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, has sent mixed signals on where it stands. It praised Shuster’s bill last week, but in June one of its officials told lawmakers it could support eliminating the grandfather clause as long as newer pipelines aren’t burdened with additional requirements.
But Shuster’s bill has drawn criticism from California’s two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, as well as U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, a Democrat whose congressional district includes San Bruno. “I worry about how many more communities are going to have to be blown up before Congress gets the message,” Speier said.
ROBERT T. NELSON
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