More Than Half US Natural Gas Pipelines Haven't Been Inspected Inside - Source Dow Jones Newswire - September 2,2011

NTSB: More Than Half US Natural Gas Pipelines Haven't Been Inspected Inside by Cassandra Sweet Dow Jones Newswires August 30, 2011 More than half the natural gas pipelines that criss-cross the U.S. can't be inspected inside because of the way they were built or installed decades ago, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday. "Many older pipelines in the U.S. ... have not been inspected" inside to determine their integrity, NTSB investigator Robert Trainor said, speaking at a meeting webcast from Washington. The agency was meeting Tuesday to discuss the conclusions of a nearly one-year investigation into the cause of a fatal explosion of a PG&E Corp. (PCG) natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, Calif., and discuss lessons learned to avoid a repeat of the accident. Last Sept. 9, PG&E's San Bruno pipeline exploded, igniting a fireball that killed eight people, injured 58, destroyed 38 homes and damaged 70 others. In a final report, NTSB investigators faulted PG&E for the pipeline explosion, saying the pipeline had extreme defects that the company should have noticed and fixed, but didn't. They also concluded that lax oversight by state regulators allowed PG&E to continue unsafe practices. PG&E had not used high-pressure water tests or completed in-line inspections of the pipeline that ruptured. The company had been given an exemption from federal regulations that require rigorous pipeline testing and monitoring because it was installed before requirements were put in place in 1961 and 1970, Trainor said. He added that many aging pipelines in the U.S. were given similar exemptions. The NTSB investigation found the San Bruno pipe would have failed if it had been tested in 1961 or 1970, Trainor said. "It had, in effect no safety margin," he said. NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said older pipelines should be tested. "It's ironic" that decades-old pipelines that might have defects are exempt from being tested, Sumwalt said. "There's something wrong with that, it's backwards." Copyright (c) 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc