C. C. McEachern, United Gas Corporation, P. O. Box 2628, Houston, Texas 77001. L. W. Mendonsa, Bureau of Natural Gas, Federal Power Commission, 441 G Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20426. J. A. Millen, Southern Counties Gas Co., P. O. Box 2736, Los Angeles, California 90054. G. D. Mock, Washington Gas Light Company, 1100 H Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005. W. M. Neckerman, Republic Steel Corporation, P. O. Box 6778, Cleveland, Ohio 44101. R. L. Oden, Taylor Forge & Pipe Works, P. O. Box 485, Chicago, Illinois 60690. M. J. Peterson, Oklahoma Natural Gas Company, P. O. Box 871, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74102. T. H. Pofahl, El Paso Natural Gas Company, P. O. Box 1492, El Paso, Texas 79999. F. W. Reinhart, Plastic Pipe Institute, 9918 Sutherland Rd., Silver Spring, Maryland 20901. H. P. Rogers, Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc., 4 Irving Place, Room 1300, New York, New York 10003. Maurice Royer, National Energy Board, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. R. C. Seybold, Pittsburgh Testing Laboratory, 724 Central Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana 70121. A. J. Shoup, Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation, P. O. Box 2521, Houston, Texas 77001. R. D. Smith, Pacific Gas & Electric Company, 245 Market Street, San Francisco, California 94106. B. W. Snyder, Canadian Western Natural Gas Company, Ltd., 140 Sixth Avenue, S.W. Calgary, Alberta, Canada. M. G. Spangler, Civil Engineering Department, Iowa State University of Science & Technology, Ames, Iowa 50012. A. W. Stanzel, Michigan Wisconsin Pipe Line Company, One Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan 48226. H. L. Stowers, Texas Gas Transmission Corporation, P. O. Box 1160, Owensboro, Kentucky 42301. J. E. Thompson, Natural Gas Pipeline Company of America, 102 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60603. G. W. White, Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company, P. O. Box 2511, Houston, Texas 77001. C. J. Wilhelm, Bureau of Mines, U.S. Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C. 20240. F. S. G. Williams, Taylor Forge & Pipe Works, Inc., P. O. Box 485, Chicago. Illinois 60690. (The following information was subsequently received for the record :) OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION, Hon. VANCE HARTKE, DEAR SENATOR HARTKE: During the hearings which you conducted with respect to the several bills to amend the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, you voiced your concern over an "agreement" that existed between this office and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. At that time I stated that this relationship did not constitute an agreement nor did it confer any special privileges upon ASME. Enclosed for your information are copies of correspondence with ASME that took place subsequent to the letter to which you were referring. As you can see, both ASME and OPS were concerned that this arrangement might be misinterpreted and, as a result, steps were taken to redefine this working relationship. I hope that these letters will clarify our situation with respect to ASME. It would be appreciated if these letters could be inserted at an appropriate place in the transcript. You also requested information as to the number of leak reports received by telephone pursuant to our regulations. That information is as follows: From the initiation of the telephonic reporting requirement on February 9, 070 to December 31, 1970, telephonic notices of 333 leaks in distribution lines and 156 leaks in transmission lines were received by the Office of Pipeline Safety. From January 1, 1971 through October 30, 1971, telephonic notices of 460 distribution line leaks and 195 transmission line leaks were received by the Office of Pipeline Safety. If we can be of any further assistance, please call on us. Enclosures. Mr. JOSEPH C. CALDWELL, JOSEPH C. CALDWELL, Acting Director, Office of Pipeline Safety. AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS, New York, N.Y., November 6, 1970. Acting Director, Office of Pipeline Safety, Office of the Secretary of Transportation, Washington, D.C. DEAR MR. CALDWELL: This will acknowledge receipt of your letter of September 18, 1970. The ASME has been very active in implementing the understanding between your office and our ASME Gas Piping Standards Committee and we are convinced that our proposed ASME Guide for Gas Piping Facilities will perform a much needed public service. I am concerned about a minor semantic problem in this activity. The use of the phrase, "ASME/OPS Agreement" has sometimes been given the connotation of a contract between the two organizations. I'm sure you regard it, as I do, as a "working arrangement" to enable ASME to continue its contribution to the protection of the public in the area of pipeline safety. In this respect it appears to be succeeding admirably. Sincerely yours, ALLEN F. RHODES. Mr. ALLEN F. RHODES, OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION, President, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Rockwell Manufacturing Co., Pittsburgh, Pa. DEAR MR. RHODES: In your letter of November 6, 1970, you indicated your concern over the use of the term "agreement" to describe the relationship between OPS and ASME. I agree that this term gives the connotation, however unintended, that a contract may exist between the two organizations. This "agreement" was intended, as you know, to describe the actions that each organization hoped to undertake individually in order to enable ASME to continue their valuable contributions toward the improvement of pipeline safety and to allow OPS to efficiently utilize this valuable reservoir of technical knowledge. To avoid any misinterpretations of this arrangement, we have restated the list of intended actions without attempting to characterize it. In doing so, we have made several minor changes to clarify our mutual intent and to avoid any implication of a contractual relationship. We believe the list might be better stated as follows: 1. OPS encourages the publication by ASME of the Federal regulations in a document that incorporates the design, rules, material references, and other recommended practices of the ASME code, appropriately arranged and referenced to the regulations. 2. OPS urges the ASME committee to submit recommendations to OPS in the form of petitions for rule making. The professional standing of the participants in ASME committee work would require us to give these petitions serious consideration and, anticipating that these petition would warrant issuance of a notice of proposed rule making with a request for public comment, OPS will act promptly on them. 3. OPS will invite ASME technical comment on requests for approval of new processes, procedures, or materials to be used under the regulations, and will consider the ASME reply in acting on the requests. 4. OPS will, in developing technical justification for proposed regulations, maintain regular contact between the respective staffs. 5. OPS will put the ASME code committee members on its mailing list for all public information regarding pipeline safety activities. 6. OPS will furnish ASME routinely developed leak and failure information as it becomes available and will cooperate in developing special studies of information in the data collection system. 7. ASME will review the operation of its pipeline code committee and its relationship with other organizations such as ANSI to ensure conformance to its safety code policy. 8. ASME will study and revise, if necessary, the pipeline code committee practices regarding documentation of, and the public record of, the background material supporting committee action on proposals for code changes and recommendations for changes, which would also involve changes to the Federal regulations. 9. ASME will put OPS on its mailing list for all information which goes to the liquid pipeline and gas pipeline code committees. We believe this list more accurately reflects the original intentions of both OPS and ASME. Enclosed for your review is a comparison of the two versions. If you have any objection to the manner in which this list has been restated, please advise us. Sincerely, JOSEPH C. CALDWELL, Acting Director, Office of Pipeline Safety. Mr. CALDWELL. I would like to answer the second part of your question. Senator HARTKE. Let me tell you, I think it is poor judgment to go ahead and put the Government in that type of compromising position. Mr. CALDWELL. In my estimation, it does not put the Government in a compromising position. Considering the technical competence of these people, if they assemble or develop a standard, I think with that much expertise and effort going into it, we should have it reviewed for possible rulemaking. Senator HARTKE. What correspondence and discussions have you had with this organization as a result of this agreement? Mr. CALDWELL. Well, sir, they have proposed several standards or modifications of standards, and we have some of those under review for proposed rulemaking. Senator HARTKE. Was any change made in the rulemaking proposed on July 8, 1969, in regard to reporting gas leaks, made as a result of your conversations with this organization? Mr. CALDWELL. No, sir, to my recollection not as an organization. They participated in the rulemaking as individual companies. Senator HARTKE. Did they request that it be modified? Mr. CALDWELL. Sir, the public record is full of comments on that reporting system. The ASME may or may not have commented as a unit. The individual operators and the industry parties certainly did comment. This is the purpose of the rulemaking procedure. Senator HARTKE. The final regulation issued was substantially weaker than the proposed rulemaking on July 8? Mr. CALDWELL. When you say substantially weaker, it was not as published in the notices of proposed rulemaking. I do not remember the exact modifications or changes. Senator HARTKE. Well, the change substantially was that the distribution system first had to serve more than a hundred thousand eustomers before it had to be reported. Mr. CALDWELL. Yes, sir. Senator HARTKE. And second, it had to require immediate repair and other emergency action to protect the public, such as evacuation of a building, blocking off of an area, and rerouting of traffic. That was the only kind of leak which was required to be reported, is that true? Mr. CALDWELL. First of all, the public record shows that initially the requirement was on the small gas company operators to report or to do the individual investigation of these leaks required to be reported. Comments indicated that this was such a burden on them that we felt if the large operators, who had the manpower and the capability of investigating and reporting, could do it, we would focus on them for a while and see if their reports are adequate in determining the cause of leaks. Senator HARTKE. Tell us, what is the purpose of leak reporting? Senator HARTKE. Yes. Mr. DAVIS. We have talked a lot about this. We had over a thousand of them in 1970. Senator HARTKE. How many miles of pipeline are there? Mr. CALDWELL. This covers the transmission, gathering, and distribution systems. Now, there are approximately a million miles of pipeline, less the number of miles controlled by operators with less than 100,000 customers, who are not required to file individual leak reports, and less the gathering lines in rural areas that do not report at all. I do not have that mileage available. Senator HARTKE. Go ahead, what is the purpose of leak reporting? Mr. DAVIS. Sir, we are trying to find out what is going on, and the overall objective in putting out this part 191.5, as I understand it at this time, was to get a report on significant leaks. There are obviously far more leaks than those that are reported. But what we have got, we think at this particular time, is a pretty good balance between all the leaks that could be reported and those that would have meaning to us in refining existing regulations and rules. If you notice, sir, the words that define the criteria which would be used by people in the field in making these reports would produce a report that would give us a pretty good idea of every significant leak that takes place within the United States, and I think that is what we have. That really is the objective of the report, to get significant leaks reported that can be investigated, and to find out all we can about those leaks that should be properly applied in refining our regulations. Senator HARTKE. How many of the leaks are caused by corrosion? Mr. DAVIS. Fifteen percent, sir, of our significant leaks, according to past records, have been caused by corrosion. Senator HARTKE. You made a speech on October 26, 1971, to the Independent Natural Gas Association of America in San Francisco, Calif., is that right? Mr. DAVIS. Yes, sir. Senator HARTKE. In that speech, you said: We found that one half of all leaks of gas facilities were caused by corrosion. Mr. DAVIS. Yes, sir. Mr. CALDWELL. Let me clear that up. He said that was approximately half of the leaks that are repaired, not those reported under our cri teria. He said approximately, also. Mr. DAVIS. As a matter of fact, Mr. Chairman, after I made that. speech and prepared for this hearing, I raised exactly the same question you did, and as it developed we are talking about two different things, sir. Senator HARTKE. You mean a part of the sentence was left out? Mr. DAVIS. No, sir, Mr. Chairman. My understanding is that in some cases when you talk about leaks you might be talking about hundreds of thousands of leaks. When we are talking about reported leaks in 1970, there were about a thousand. These are the significant leaks, so, I think that it is necessary for one to define his terms quite carefully in any statement that one makes about leaks. Senator HARTKE. If there is a leak, as far as the net result, a bad leak is a bad leak, right? Mr. DAVIS. A bad leak is a bad leak, and by definition here, it should be reported, because this should cover all bad leaks. Senator HARTKE. If you have a bad leak in a small system, say, under a thousand customers, what happens then? Is that not required to be reported? Mr. DAVIS. No, sir; only operators serving more than 100,000 customers report bad leaks. Mr. CALDWELL. We have a requirement that under certain conditions and if you are looking at the criteria there-telephonic reports all companies are required to make a telephonic report immediately or as soon as practical, within a few hours, after the leak or failure occurs. We know about those incidents immediately, and we can evaluate them and follow up on them as we deem necessary. Those operators who have less than 100,000 customers are not required to fill out an individual written leak report. However, in the annual report of their operating experience, all companies are required to give us the total leaks that occur in their systems. Senator HARTKE. How many leaks do you think there are happening in the country? How many? Mr. CALDWELL. Sir, I have no idea. Senator HARTKE. You have a report of a thousand? Mr. CALDWELL. Of 1,019 significant leaks as guided by our criteria, yes, sir. The definition of the term "leak" has never been established, and this is what we are attempting to do. When we set up our leak reporting system, we obviously wanted to get the significant leaks or the worst ones. We wanted to know about those and evaluate them. We had no idea whether we would get information on a thousand leaks or 10,000 leaks. Nobody that we know of in Government or in industry had any idea of the number of leaks. We are now evaluating these, and we will go ahead and modify our system until such time as we get what we think is sufficient data to determine the cause of these leaks and use the information in modifying our regulations. Senator HARTKE. You mentioned that the Department does not object to an amendment to permit the Federal reimbursement of 50 percent of the State expenses incurred in an inspection of interstate lines because you say that the States should not be required to bear this financial burden alone. Why then did the Department advise the States that they cannot tax interstate pipelines to defray the inspection cost now? Mr. DAVIS. Sir, it is my understanding that the act does not give that authority to the Department of Transportation, and since the Department of Transportation does not have that authority, it cannot delegate that authority or give that authority to the States. However, it is our view that the States do have the authority to do as they will in this particular case. Senator HARTKE. Why wouldn't you have just stayed out of that area? That is a taxation area. Why would you have moved into such an area of taxation? |