Alert
Alert
By
01.25.12
On January 3, President Obama signed into law the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act of 2011 (a title strongly influenced by current political issues). This act, sponsored as H.R. 2845 by Representative Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), brings sweeping changes to the nation’s pipeline safety law, imposing a variety of new design, construction, testing, operation, maintenance, and emergency response requirements for the nation’s 2.3 million miles of pipelines for natural gas, petroleum, and hazardous liquids.
The new law was among the few pieces of bipartisan legislation coming out of a highly divided Congress. Passage was due, in part, to gas pipeline disasters that killed 19 and hospitalized more than 100 people across the nation in 2010 and killed six people in 2011.
The law amends Title 49 of the U.S. Code, primarily in Chapter 601, and reauthorizes the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002 (PSIA) through fiscal year 2015, including funding for programs administered by the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). Highlights of the new law are presented below.
Higher Penalties
PHMSA’s administrative penalty authority was doubled to as high as $200,000 per violation per day, up to a cap of $2 million for a related series of violations such as a failure to accurately mark the location of pipeline facilities in the vicinity of a demolition, excavation, tunneling or construction project. The prior caps were $100,000 and $1 million. The new penalty caps will no longer apply in the case of judicial enforcement actions initiated by the Department of Justice. Also, PHMSA is given expanded authority to investigate accidents related to pipeline safety and may now seek penalties against any person who obstructs such an investigation, e.g., failure to make available for the Department of Transportation all records and information that in any way pertains to the accident being investigated.
Download: Oil, Gas, and Hazardous Liquid Pipelines Face Many New Safety Requirements