[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 59 (Wednesday, April 22, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H2361-H2362]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  PHMSA IS ACTUALLY A TOOTHLESS KITTEN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Speier) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. SPEIER. Mr. Speaker, last week before the Transportation and 
Infrastructure's committee on pipeline safety, I called the Pipeline 
and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, known as PHMSA, ``a 
toothless tiger that has overdosed on quaaludes and is passed out on 
the job.''
  Today I stand before you to say I was wrong. I was wrong to call 
PHMSA a toothless tiger. PHMSA is actually a toothless kitten, a fluffy 
industry pet that frightens absolutely no one. This has been proven 
beyond a shadow of a doubt by yesterday's excellent Politico 
investigation of PHMSA's ineffectual ``can't do'' attitude, written by 
Elana Schor and Andrew Restuccia. Allow me to highlight some of the 
shocking incompetence brought to light by this article.
  All rules made by PHMSA undergo peer review by two advisory 
committees: one on oil and one on gas. In theory, the committee is made 
up of five members each from industry, government, and public. Sounds 
good, right? Well, that might be true except the committee's current 
rosters are missing seven members on the government and public sides. 
This means the industry is calling the shots and voting for their own 
initiatives. On these committees there is almost no formal resistance 
to doing the industry's bidding.
  That is what Deborah Hersman, former head of the National 
Transportation Safety Board, meant when she said: ``For the regulator 
to delegate too much authority to the regulated to assess their own 
system risks and correct them is tantamount to the fox guarding the 
henhouse.''
  As we have seen in my district and in so many others, the fox has 
very little incentive to prevent oil or gas from spoiling the henhouse 
or to prevent the hens from blowing up. Of course, everyone is very 
sorry about the fact, but the will to prevent these accidents in the 
first place is simply not there. That is what happened in Mayflower, 
Arkansas, in 2013 when PHMSA let ExxonMobil operate an oil pipeline 
that was known to be faulty for 7 years, and then it blew up.
  Nowhere is this more obvious than PHMSA's pitiful fines. Fines are 
supposed to be a deterrent, and yet the fines that PHMSA levies are so 
pathetic compared to the cost of pipeline leaks and explosions that 
they can't even be seen on this graph. Here you see that over the last 
12 years PHMSA has issued just $44.2 million in fines for incidents 
that cost over $5 billion. Look at these tiny red lines. You can't even 
see them. You can see these other graph points that show how much 
damage was actually done, but the fines are next to nothing.
  Take the Mayflower, Arkansas, example where dumping 200,000 gallons 
of heavy crude into a neighborhood cost ExxonMobil $2.7 million, or 
0.008 percent of that year's profits. To industry, this measly fine is 
just the cost of doing business. No need to fix a pipeline. Fines are 
so small, it is cheaper to just pay them.
  But, of course, damage from pipeline leaks and explosions can't be 
reduced to just gray bars. In my district, the city of San Bruno, where 
eight people were killed by a pipeline explosion in 2010, the public 
remains traumatized by the idea that their entire neighborhood could be 
wiped out by one carelessly inspected or uninspected pipeline. Life has 
risks, but one of them shouldn't be coming home to find your husband 
and son and mother-in-law dead and your house obliterated, as happened 
to one of the families in my district.
  That is why I find PHMSA's utter failure to implement more rigorous 
safety regulations so disgusting. PHMSA's reasoning that such 
regulations are ``too costly for the pipeline industry compared with 
the expected benefits'' is the reasoning of movie villains, not well-
intentioned safety professionals who are supposed to be taking care of 
the public interest. Whose side is PHMSA on?
  Now, one could argue that the low penalties are Congress' fault, not

[[Page H2362]]

PHMSA's. After all, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has power 
to impose civil penalties of a million dollars per day. Compare that to 
PHMSA's relatively paltry $200,000 a day. But that doesn't explain 
PHMSA's failure to even start civil penalty cases.
  Even as pipeline incidents increase, PHMSA started fewer civil 
penalty cases in 2014 than in the past 10 years and proposed 73 percent 
fewer fines. For the few fines that are proposed, PHMSA does that 
behind closed doors where the public is not welcome.
  ExxonMobil dumped 63,000 gallons of oil into Yellowstone River in 
2011 but managed to argue that the original $1.7 million fine should be 
put down to $1 million. Why did PHMSA allow this? Nobody knows.
  Though I've talked about San Bruno, I want to emphasize that the lack 
of adequate pipeline safety measures is a nationwide problem, not a Bay 
Area or California problem. In 2011, a leak from an 83-year-old cast-
iron main in Allentown, Pennsylvania, caused a blast that killed 5 
people. In 2012, a gas pipeline explosion outside of Charleston, West 
Virginia, destroyed several properties. In 2014, a leak in a 127-year-
old pipeline in Harlem, New York, killed 8 and injured 50 more. In each 
incident, we see the same, recurring problems--aging infrastructure and 
inadequate inspection. How many more of these tragedies do we need 
before we get serious about pipeline safety?
  The saddest part about this whole situation is that we know how to 
prevent pipeline leaks and explosions. The National Transportation 
Safety Board has been saying the same thing for years, after so many 
deaths and the destruction of property and the environment. We need 
automatic or remote control shutoff valves. We need existing pipelines 
to accommodate internal inspection tools. We need PHMSA to be a strong 
voice for safety for the public and we need industry to cease being 
apologists for lethal incompetence.
  Like so many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I'm tired 
of PHSMA's excuses and prevarications. I'm frustrated that Congress 
seems powerless to induce PHMSA to take its job seriously. That's why 
I'm looking into legislation that will provide PHMSA with the proper 
encouragement to do its job. It's time for the toothless kitten to wake 
up, smell the leaking gas, and take decisive action.

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