US pipelines and waterways have accommodated most of the growth in the transportation of crude oil, petroleum products, and other hazardous liquids and gases well as the US energy landscape has changed, the National Academies of Science, Engineering & Medicine’s Transportation Research Board indicated.
“They have done so without creating major new safety problems and within the basic framework of their longstanding regulatory and safety assurance systems,” it said in a Feb. 20 report. Emergency response preparedness has improved overall, but progress varies by location and opportunities to do better remain, the report said.
“Many communities lack familiarity with responding to large-scale incidents involving trainloads of flammable liquids,” it said. “Industry and government authorities face a continuing challenge in ensuring that these response procedures are widely known and that existing training opportunities are exploited.”
The committee recommended that the US Pipeline & Hazardous Materials Safety Administration comprehensively review successes and failures in responding to transportation safety challenges since 2005 to inform the development of more anticipatory and robust safety assurance systems.
“Moreover, PHMSA and other safety regulators should encourage pipeline, barge, and rail carriers to make greater use of quantitative risk analysis tools, for instance, to inform decisions about priorities for maintenance and integrity management of the equipment and infrastructure and about the routing of energy liquids by rail,” it said.
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