Review of Company Documents Show Columbia Gas Did Not Have Sufficient Safety and Response Measures in Place

Washington (October 5, 2018) – Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) today demanded answers from Columbia Gas of Massachusetts and its parent company NiSource on critical deficiencies in company safety and response plans for a disaster like what occurred in the Merrimack Valley on September 13, 2018. After reviewing key company safety, operations and response plans, the Senators found that Columbia Gas did not properly contemplate the possibility that a disaster like this could occur, did not have sufficient safety measures in place to prevent a disaster, and was not prepared to respond. The Senators also reviewed updated operating policies put in place by Columbia Gas five days after the disaster and questioned the company on why these commonsense safety measures, such as knowing the exact location of control lines and ensuring the qualified company personnel are onsite during the duration of any work, were not in place before the disaster occurred.

“The omission of these sorts of safety measures from Columbia Gas’ operating procedures prior to this disaster is alarming and unacceptable,” the Senators write. “It raises serious questions as to why these policies were not previously in place for Columbia Gas’ systems and whether that failure was the result of negligence, cost considerations, or incompetence.”

A copy of the Senators’ letter to Columbia Gas and NiSource can be found HERE. 

“After reviewing Columbia Gas’ safety, operations, and response plans provided to our offices, it appears that Columbia Gas was woefully unprepared for a major, system-wide disaster like the one that occurred on September 13, 2018 in Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover, Massachusetts,” the Senators continue. “[T]he company underestimated the possibility of an extremely serious incident, did not adequately build redundancies into its operations or put in place key safety measures to prevent it, and was utterly unprepared to respond to it. Taken together, these failures created conditions that made this disaster a near certainty, yet Columbia Gas does not appear even to have contemplated that an incident of this magnitude could occur.”

The Senators reviewed the Distribution Integrity Management Plan, the Operations and Maintenance Manual, an updated Operational Notice issued five days after the disaster, the 2018 Emergency Response Plan, and other materials and responses provided by the companies, and found serious flaws:

• The company did not have the human and technological redundancies that would ensure that if one system failed, additional measures were present to prevent a major disaster;
• They did not have a clear or sufficient plan in place for when to shut down the system if something went wrong such as an over-pressurization event, who would make that key decision to shut down the system, and how quickly it would need to be made;
• They failed to require key commonsense safety measures until five days after the disaster occurred, such as knowing the exact location of control lines to sense and control pressure, identifying and monitoring all regulator stations in the area, and requiring qualified company personnel to be onsite for the duration of any work on the system;
• Columbia Gas underestimated the risks of operator error and of a system-wide over-pressurization event on low-pressure cast iron pipeline systems;
• The Merrimack Valley disaster appears to be orders of magnitude larger than anything for which Columbia Gas had prepared in their emergency response plan;
• The Columbia Gas response plan contained no timelines for communicating with the public after a disaster or while a disaster may be ongoing;
• Columbia Gas had not followed the American Petroleum Institute’s 2015 recommendation that they create a Pipeline Safety Management System to manage risk.

Copies of the responses reviewed by the Senators can be found here:

Hamrock Letter to Senators Markey and Warren

Bryant Response Letter to 9-18 Letter

Bryant Response Letter to 9-21 Letter

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