January 2013, Vol. 68, No. 1
Newsline
Interstate natural gas pipelines committed to safety
Don Santa, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, recently released a statement on the National Transportation Safety Board’s decision to include pipelines on its 2013 Most Wanted List of transportation safety issues. Excerpts from that statement follow.
“The natural gas pipeline transmission industry is committed to safe and reliable operations, and takes that commitment seriously. In 2010, INGAA established a board-level pipeline safety task force to pursue ways to further improve the industry’s safety performance. In early 2011, INGAA established five guiding principles of pipeline safety, anchored with an overarching goal of zero pipeline accidents. Since then, we’ve followed through with commitments and concrete actions and are developing performance metrics to ensure that our pipeline safety goals are met.”
Santa went on to express that INGAA members are addressing all of the issues that the NTSB has outlined as concerns about the pipeline industry in addition to ensuring that all pipelines, regardless of their age, are fit for service and operating safely.
“We have improved maintenance procedures and have gone beyond existing regulation to voluntarily expand the integrity management program to areas outside highly populated areas and have established a roadmap to implement new inspection technologies.
“We are committed to reducing incident response time and are engaging first responders, fire chiefs and other emergency officials.
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