Gas and hazardous pipeline operators are required to report all pipeline incidents to Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) including location, volume of product released, number of fatalities and injuries, costs and cause. Since 2005, pipeline operators have reported excavation damage as the cause of 1052 incidents, resulting in 48 fatalities, 195 injuries requiring hospitalization, and $ 481,736,551 of property damage.
Since 2004 the total miles of pipeline in the US including crude oil lines, petroleum product lines, gas distribution mains, gas transmission pipelines, and gas gathering lines increased by about 12 % to 1,830,672 miles in 2017. Pipeline operators are required to submit performance measure reports to PHMSA for pipeline infrastructure covered by integrity management (IM) programs. This includes gas distribution, gas transmission, and hazardous liquids.
Pipeline operators are required to report all pipeline damage and leak incidents to PHMSA. Failure to do so can result in a fine. The leading causes of pipeline incidents are corrosion, excavation, and incorrect operation of equipment.
PHMSA has devoted significant effort to reducing damage during excavation. In some states certain type of excavators are exempt from calling one-call centres. In Texas, which is the state with the most miles of natural gas pipelines and the most accidents, exempt groups include gravediggers, railroad maintenance crews, oil and gas drillers, farmers, and county and state road crews. A 2014 PHMSA report A Study on the Impact of Excavation Damage on Pipeline Safety found that its analysis suggested that exemptions for property owners from calling the one-call notification system, especially when coupled with exemptions for hand tools, can lead to higher percentages of damages. For the States that were analyzed, the analysis indicated that the damage rates for States with five or more notification exemptions is 108 percent greater than the rate for States with fewer than five notification exemptions. A similar analysis, performed by the United States Infrastructure Corporation (USIC) and based on information gathered during USIC’s investigations of over 100,000 damages, also found that larger numbers of exemptions from State one-call laws coincided with increased damage rates. PHMSA has stated that it believes that State one-call damage prevention laws should apply to all excavators, that no entities should be exempt from the one-call notification process.
The 2017 PHMSA report entitled A Study on Improving Damage Prevention Technology found that despite efforts by PHMSA and other stakeholder groups, including pipeline operators, excavators, and trade associations such as the Common Ground Alliance, to improve the practices and technologies, excavation damage remains one of the leading causes of serious pipeline accidents. It made several recommendations, among them are improving and implementing GPS/GIS technologies in accurately locating and documenting the location of underground facilities, national standards for state one-call requirements and evaluating and implementing predictive analytic tools,which use data to identify and proactively address high-risk excavations.
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