The bill:

• Doubles the maximum fine for pipeline safety violations and extends federal safety oversight of gas, oil and other liquid pipelines through 2015.
• Authorizes the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to hire 10 more safety inspectors.
• Commissions studies to determine if more needs to be done to secure transmission pipelines throughout the system and in more populated areas as well.
• Contains a strong incentive for states to remove current one call exemptions, requiring all entities that excavate around pipelines to call a hotline before they dig to learn about what might be below – a provision that is sure to help reduce the number of accidents due to digging,
• Newly constructed pipelines will be required to include automatic shutoff valves that isolate a section of pipe in event of a rupture, preventing further gas or liquid from escaping.

This bill the culmination of a lot of hard work by the sponsors and chief proponents of this legislation and by the natural gas industry which makes safety its highest priority.

More than 200 natural gas utilities make up the American Gas Association and they work tirelessly to ensure that customers, regulators and elected officials are confident in their ability to safely deliver their product.  The provisions contained in this legislation will enhance our industry’s ability to serve our customers safely and reliably.  We hope to see this level of cooperation amongst our nation’s leaders and between government and the private sector on future legislation.

Our members look forward to working with federal and state regulators to ensure that the natural gas distribution and transmission system – more than 2 million miles of local utility pipelines – continues to be the safest and most reliable method of delivering energy in the nation.

Our speaker from the National Transportation Safety Board was the Hon. Christopher Hart, whose message focused on the benefits of collaboration and how it’s possible to improve safety and productivity at the same time.  U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood acknowledged the industry for its engagement in pipeline safety issues and pledged to work towards passage of the pipeline safety legislation.  The media was invited to hear Secretary LaHood’s address and both speakers took questions from the audience.

What would an AGA event be without an opportunity to relax and spend some time networking?  During the reception on Monday evening, we were joined by Senator Rand Paul and had the opportunity to speak with him.

Other highlights included a lunch address from PG&E’s Nick Stavropoulos on rebuilding trust in the community following San Bruno, and Tuesday’s CEO panel focused on strategies leaders can use to build a strong safety culture within an organization.  Tuesday afternoon also included a video presentation from Tom Taylor of Consumers Energy called “In the Blink of an Eye.”  The DVD provides very moving interviews with company staff involved in an incident where an employee life was almost lost.

The 2012 Executive Leadership Safety Summit will take place in conjunction with the Operating Section Fall Committee Meetings in Atlanta, GA in September.  As well as being invited to share information (DVD’s, books, posters, websites) on their company’s safety culture and procedures, members attending the 2012 Summit will have the opportunity to bring their contractors to the event to take away information and practices to improve safety ‘back home.’

The presentations from the 2011 Executive Leadership Safety Summit have been posted online and are available to full and limited members.  We’ve posted some of the photos below but you can see the full set here or at our Facebook page.

Having attended a variety of discussions featuring state regulators from Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Ohio, members of Congress like Senators Bingaman and Hoeven, and representatives from working groups like STRONGER and FracFocus, I think that the Subcommittee’s report culminates some thoughtful discussions on what we need to do to keep the natural gas value chain clean, green and safe. We can expect a final 180-day report from the Subcommittee on November 18, 2011, to made available on the Subcommittee’s website.

Building Pipelines for Safety

Construction

• Expand requirements of the Operator Qualification (OQ) rule to include new construction of distribution and transmission pipelines.
• Review established Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) procedures associated with pipeline construction to ensure adequacy of oversight and confirm that operator construction practices and procedures are followed.

Emergency Shutoff Valves

• Support the use of automatic shutoff and/or remote control valves where economically, technically and operationally feasible on transmission lines that are being newly constructed or entirely replaced. Develop guidelines for consideration of automatic shutoff and remote control valves on transmission lines that are already in service.  We commit to working with appropriate regulatory agencies to develop criteria. 
• Expand the use of excess flow valves to new and fully replaced distribution branch services, small multi-family facilities, and small commercial facilities where economically, technically and operationally feasible. 

Operating Pipelines Safely

Integrity Management 

• Continue to advance integrity management programs and principles to mitigate system specific risks.  This includes operational activities as well as the repair, replacement or rehabilitation of pipelines and associated facilities where it will most improve safety and reliability.
• Develop industry guidelines for data management to advance data quality and knowledge related to pipeline integrity.
• Support development of processes and guidelines that enable the tracking and traceability of new pipeline components.

Excavation Damage Prevention

• Support strong enforcement of the 811 – Call Before You Dig program through state damage prevention laws.
• Improve the level of engagement between the operator and excavators working in the immediate vicinity of the operator’s pipelines. 

Enhancing Pipeline Safety

Safety Knowledge Sharing

• Review programs currently utilized for the sharing of safety information. Identify and implement models that will enhance safety knowledge exchange among operators, contractors, government and the public.

Stakeholder Engagement and Emergency Response

• Evaluate methods to more effectively communicate with public officials, excavators, consumers, safety advocates and members of the public about the presence of pipelines.  Implement tested and proven communication methods to enhance those communications.
• Partner with emergency responders to share information and improve emergency response coordination. 

Pipeline Planning Engagement

• Work with a coalition of Pipelines and Informed Planning Alliance (PIPA) Guidance stakeholders to increase awareness of risk based land use options and adopt existing PIPA recommended best practices.

Advancing Technology Development

• Increase investment, continue participation, and support research, development and deployment of technologies to improve safety.  Evaluate and appropriately implement new technological advances.

Safety is the number one priority for all our members and that goes for their employees, the people who live in these communities. Here’s a quote from one of the people in the video:

“Safety is the most important message Consumers Energy delivers,” said Jim Whitford, a gas service supervisor in Pontiac, Mich. “My team responds to nearly 10,000 gas leaks a year. I’m proud to encourage our crews and the public to identify the gas leaks and respond. Using our own experienced employees is the right thing to do.”

Well said.

They also feature the video on their website and YouTube, and have developed a handy brochure that hits their key safety points. The brochure and website both do a great job of giving short bullet points on what you should be doing as you recognize, react and report. The brochure also gives some other places you can go for natural gas safety information.

• Call 811 is the source of information about safe digging
• Common Ground Alliance promotes best practices in damage prevention
• a link back to us.

You can check out the video below or visit one of the links below. Thanks to Dan Gretzner over at Consumers Energy for sending the video our way.




So yeah, yesterday was interesting.

I’m sitting in my cube when I feel something start to shake. It’s very subtle and ends pretty quickly. I look up and see Courtney staring at me over our divider. “What was that?”

Sherri, sitting a few cubes over goes, “Sorry, I’m packing for the meeting and dropped a box.” I think to myself, “that must have been one heavy box.”

I stand up and see quite a few people beginning to move for the exits. I get out, “Maybe we should evacuate the building” before the tremors start in again. Suddenly the alarms in the building are going off. I grab my laptop, throw it in my bag, and head for the door.

The Dominion twitter stream was a great source of information.

At this point, no one knows what’s going on. Sadly, 10 years later, my first thought is there has been an explosion somewhere close by. Our offices are right by the Capitol and Union Station so there’s always a concern the area would be a target. Talking with people around the office after, I wasn’t alone in thinking it had been an explosion.

I am glad to say that everyone evacuated in an orderly manner. Thankfully, it wasn’t like that scene in Airplane, for those of you old enough to remember, where it was anarchy. People moved quickly down the stairs and out of the building.

As soon as we were all gathered at our meeting area people started pulling out phones and figuring out what was going on. There are quite a few geologists and engineers at AGA so the conversation quickly turned to earthquake measurements and fault lines.

After a while, we started getting messages from Kevin updating us on the status of the building and letting us know what was going on. The building was closed for the evening. We were told we could go back to collect anything we needed or to head out.

Everyone had stories today about their respective commutes. My usual hour commute stretching into two and a half hours. Ella’s long bus ride. Paula walking in uncomfortable shoes to Elizabeth’s to borrow her car to get home. Many more.

Being a communications professional, I wanted to take a quick look at what some of our members were doing to communicate with their communities during the crisis.

Local utilities using social media during the crisis

I decided to pick Dominion and BGE. Dominion because they’re close to the incident area and BGE because Ammanuel Moore will be doing a presentation at the upcoming Communications and Marketing meeting.

You can see a screenshot of the Dominion twitter stream earlier in this post. If you visit the stream you’ll see they did a great job of providing information, including real-time updates about their systems and even answering some questions.

Dominion went further and took that some process to their Facebook page to reach a different group of people. You see the same process there. Consistent messaging and response to questions from their community. Great job.

Dominion took to Facebook to reach a different audience with the same consistent messaging and customer service.

BGE did a similar great job. As you look at the BGE twitter stream, you see they let people know they are aware of the situation to put people at ease. They give updates and include their 800 number in tweets so people can contact them easily to report outages. I’m hopeful that Ammanuel will be able to include more details about how they were using their communications channels during his talk.

Great job of including the 800 number in their tweets so people on mobile devices can find the number easily.

More on social media during crisis communications

East coast people aren’t used to earthquakes so while our friends on the left coast would probably shrug and move on, the earthquake generated quite a bit of action here. Following the East Coast quake at approx 1:55 p ET, the term “earthquake” appeared in Facebook status updates for nearly 3 mil U.S. users.

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security urged citizens to use social media to contact one another instead of phone lines. People needed little encouragement though as these communication channels are now fairly mainstream. The stats below are from a recent national survey:

• The Internet is now the third most popular way for people to gather emergency information, after television and local radio
• Nearly a fourth of the online population would use social media to let family and friends know they are safe.
• 80% of the general public surveyed believe emergency response organizations should monitor social media.
• About one third of those polled via telephone said they would expect help to arrive within an hour.

Here’s an excellent post on how different government agencies were using the web during the crisis. The post includes a great infographic from the Red Cross on how Americans use social tools during a crisis. Here’s another great infographic on using social media during a crisis.  The post is from February so I’d venture those percentages have increased. You can click the image below for a larger version.

I’m going to start working on compiling all the various twitter channels for our members to include in their profiles. I think the information will be useful in places like the mutual aid database.

Let us know what you think in the comments including any resources you think would be useful to others. I’m just hoping the hurricane this weekend fizzles out.

But in case you haven’t.

811 is what you can dial on your phone to notify utilities that you will be digging on your property. The utility companies will then come to your property and mark the approximate locations of all utility-owned lines with paint or flags. It usually only takes them a few days to come out. And, best of all the 811 service is free and worth the time to prevent an accident.

Since the creation of 811, there has been roughly a 40 percent reduction in safety incidents. However, it’s still an issue. An underground utility line is damaged during digging projects every three minutes in the United States.

You can get a lot more information from the “Did you know” section on call811.com. They even have a special section for special section for children.

So join us in celebrating National 811 day. Enjoy the video below and make sure you call before you dig.

On April 28, Dave McCurdy, president and CEO of the American Gas Association (AGA), was the guest speaker at the monthly Natural Gas Roundtable meeting.  He stressed that 2011 will prove to be a year of seismic change for the country’s energy priorities.

What will this mean for the natural gas industry?

“Geopolitical unrest in Africa and the Middle East will maintain upward pressure on the price of crude oil,” said McCurdy. “And I am not talking years, I am talking decades.”

While that will put pressure on our economy, he said, “there is a bright spot. That is natural gas. Natural gas has the potential to help move this country toward an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and domestic energy policy.”

McCurdy emphasized one shift within the industry that is not tangible, but it represents the new role natural gas is playing in our lives. Natural gas has been referred to as a bridge fuel that will sustain us until we can rely solely on renewable alternatives, but with more than 100 years of supply natural gas is more than a bridge, it is a foundation fuel.

It is our most powerful domestic asset, right beneath our feet, which will help lessen our dependence on foreign energy supplies, create American jobs, continue to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and provide consumers an affordable and reliable energy.

There will be challenges. “The challenges we will face are not physical or technical,” McCurdy said. “They are political.”

“There is a lot of energy being moved from wellhead to burner tip throughout the natural gas industry and that is why our industry is embedded in a safety culture,” said McCurdy. “We need responsible resource development, plain and simple.”

If you’re visiting this site, you’re probably familiar with Call811. If not, you can read our release from earlier this month or some of the old posts we’ve done on Call811.

The basic concept is pretty simple though. Call 811 before you dig and the operator will alert your local utilities so they can come out and mark your property before you dig. That way you’re not cutting an important line (water, electricity, natural gas, etc.) into your home. It’s the smart safe thing to do.

The Call811 website has a ton of resources that go into more detail on the program. I was just looking at it and I love the resources they have for kids. One of the best ways we can get these types of safety messages across is by reaching out to people at an early age and there are tools on the website to do that, including a great video you can watch below. You can also use this link

You can download the full children’s program kit from the Call811 website. It’s at the bottom of the communications plan materials section. The kit includes a teacher’s resource guide, treasure map learning tool (that goes along with the video) and feedback form where you can suggest ways to improve the program.

Let me know in the comments below if you’ve run this program at your school or need help finding resources in your area.