On November 14, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued five Safety Recommendations in response to the September incident in Merrimack Valley, Mass. The five recommendations were issued to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and NiSource, the parent company of Columbia Gas of Massachusetts. The recommendations are:
To the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:
1. Eliminate the professional engineer licensure exemption for public utility work and require a professional engineer’s seal on public utility engineering drawings.
To NiSource, Inc.:
2. Revise the engineering plan and constructability review process across all of your subsidiaries to ensure that all applicable departments review construction documents for accuracy, completeness, and correctness, and that the documents or plans be sealed by a professional engineer prior to commencing work.
3. Review and ensure that all records and documentation of your natural gas systems are traceable, reliable, and complete.
4. Apply management of change process to all changes to adequately identify system threats that could result in a common mode failure.
5. Develop and implement control procedures during modifications to gas mains to mitigate the risks identified during management of change operations. Gas main pressures should be continually monitored during these modifications and assets should be placed at critical locations to immediately shut down the system if abnormal operations are detected.
APGA will continue to discuss these recommendations with impacted stakeholders to better understand how they will be applied within Massachusetts and therefore might be applied elsewhere. We anticipate that further recommendations will accompany the NTSB’s Final Report, which likely will not be issued until late 2019.
More information is at
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/PSR1802.aspx.
For questions on this article, please contact Erin Kurilla of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-2742 or by email at
ekurilla@apga.org.