WASHINGTON— Don Santa, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, today released the following statement in response to the National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendations on the San Bruno, California, natural gas pipeline incident:
“INGAA’s Pipeline Safety Task Force’s Integrity Management Continuous Improvement (IMCI) team is implementing action plans that address NTSB’s recommendations. Our focus now is prioritizing and working with the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration to achieve the goals reflected in these recommendations. In December 2010, INGAA’s board of directors established a board-level task force to pursue further improvements in the industry’s safety performance and expand public confidence in the natural gas pipeline infrastructure.”
“The members of INGAA, which represents the interstate gas transmission industry, already have undertaken comprehensive efforts to achieve greater pipeline safety. Through our IMCI initiative, INGAA members are embracing organizational safety culture; using coverage of population as the basis for extending integrity management principles beyond high consequence areas; applying risk management principles to assess and mitigate threats, thereby reducing the likelihood of an incident; developing and applying guidance for their pre-regulation pipelines in high consequence areas; and improving engagement with emergency responders and setting a response-time goal for isolation procedures. For example, this month we are sponsoring an emergency responder workshop that will engage stakeholders on specific issues discussed by the NTSB. This series of initiatives and commitments will significantly improve pipeline safety for decades to come.”
“INGAA is focusing on these tasks and others using a team of industry and technical experts and will post updates as the work progresses. INGAA encourages dialogue with all pipeline safety stakeholders.”
Attached is a summary of INGAA’s action plan on pipeline safety and for more information, please click here.
