Pipeline accidents and maintaining high quality data about facilities

One of my priority topics on this blog (most recently here) and for speaking engagements is the issue of data quality, especially relating to underground infrastructure.  I think it is fair to say that as a rule in North America we don't know where underground facilities are. If you have any doubt about that assertion, call up your One-Call or Call-Before-You-Dig centre, and tell them that you intend to excavate somewhere.  What you will typically find is that seven or eight trucks will show up from all the local utility and telephone companies with magic wands and dowsing rods to determine if any of their pipes or cables run through where you plan to dig.  Rolling trucks is expensive and costs utility and telephone companies a lot of money.  If their data on their facilities were reliable, they woudn't have to send a truck out and that would save money and the time of increasingly valuable staff.  The other cost is risk to human life.  Pipeline explosions are dangerous and often involve fatalities.  The infamous gas explosion in Belgium immediately comes to mind.  Another well known example is the steam pipe exposion in New York City.

The New York Times has published an article listing some recent gasline explosions

• In February in Allentown, Pennsylvania, an explosion from a natural gas pipeline killed five people
• In September, a 30-inch-diameter pipeline in San Bruno, Calif., exploded, killing eight people and burning down three dozen houses.
• In July, a pipeline in Kalamazoo, Michigan ruptured and more than a million gallons of corrosive bitumen from the Canadian tar sands leaked.

If I remember the last time there was a cluster of pipeline accidents (Bellingham and El Paso gas where there fatalities), government moved to improve the quality of geospatial and other data about underground pipeline assets. The result within about two years was the federal Pipeline Safety Act, which required companies owning pipelines carrying hazardous materials to walk all of their lines with a GPS, conduct a "moving circle" analysis, and identify high risk areas for further inspection.  This cost a relatively small utility in Pennsylvania that I was familiar with at the time $2 million over two years. The positive result it that it forces utility companies to maintain facilities data at a ligher level of quality.

According to the New York Times, at San Bruno the problem was that Pacific Gas and Electric did not know what kind of pipe it had buried in the ground.  "Pipe fabrication flaws in the 1950s helped lay the groundwork for the accident, and more recent problems, including a poor understanding of the computers used to manage the system, may also have played a role."

In 2004 in the UK an act was passed called the Traffic Management Act which came into force a couple of years later and requires utility companies and local authorities to recort digitally the location of street-works activities in England and Wales. The motivation for this act is to help reduce disruption for the travelling public.

Some of the problems in the US identified in the article include

• Unregulated pipelines that have resulted from the shale gas boom  in the US.
• Aging pipelines

I see two lessons from these pipeline incidents. 

• It is a challenge for utility companies to be proactive about data quality.  As a rule regulators and government have to provide the motivating policies to encourage utility companies to improve the quality of their facilities records. 
• It is a challenge for governments to be proactive about mandating data quality and not wait for a serious incident to act.

Major initiatives like smart grid mean that facilities data will need to be 100% accurate and real time, to quote a colleague of mine.  I see data quality as a top priority for the next generation of infrastructure.  This will require not only improving the quality of our data about existing infrastructure, but also changing business processes and organization structures to ensure that we can maintain a high level of data quality.

Thanks to Melanie Ensign for pointing me to the New York Times article.

Comments

[Frank Gallagher]

Natural gas leaks and explosions are becoming routine in this country, and it's not just because we don't know where the lines are underground. The infrastructure is dangerously degrading. Take a look at this site, which is chronicling the destruction: http://www.naturalgaswatch.org. This is becoming a national problem.