Accident Prevention

Preventing Damage from Digging
One of the pipeline industry's major safety initiatives in recent years has been the prevention of spills caused by people who damage pipes by digging into them. Independent engineering studies of reports filed with the Office of Pipeline Safety show that these excavation accidents spill more oil from pipelines in the field than any other single cause - about 35% of the spilled oil volume with another 8% coming from delayed spills as a result of previously undetected damage. This means excavation accidents spill 43% of the oil lost from the pipes that carry oil between contained oil processing areas such as tank farms, refineries or oil fields.

When they happen, these excavation accidents often severely damage the pipe resulting in larger spills than other types of accidents. They are also a type of accident that has been proven to be especially preventable through education of excavators, communities and pipeline right-of-way neighbors. For this reason, the industry and federal regulators have made prevention of damage from excavation a top priority. Tell me more about how to prevent digging accidents.

The first line of defense against third-party damage is the national network of call centers, known as One Call centers. These centers help excavators such as construction companies, farmers, and public utility employees, to locate precisely the pipelines so they can avoid damaging them. It is a common myth that pipelines can be precisely located by their right-of-way signs. Tell me more about this myth.

One Call programs are organized and operated at the state level. They are typically funded by the underground facilities - petroleum and natural gas pipelines, utility and telecommunications cables, as well as water, sewer and electric utilities. Show me a reference list of One Call numbers.

A national education campaign - called Dig Safely - was launched in 1999. Excavators need to know about One Call centers so they will take advantage of their pipeline location services. This is so fundamental to prevention efforts that the industry and the U.S. Department of Transportation pilot tested and have now formally launched the nationwide public education and awareness campaign, Dig Safely.

Another important measure to prevent excavation accidents is to provide for land use planning that will help protect both pipes and people. In many cases around the country, communities have grown in population and have expanded into formerly undeveloped areas. In doing so, the communities have absorbed land that contains pipeline rights-of-way: the industry, therefore, has begun urging the implementation of land use policies that would set up buffers to prevent urban encroachment on pipeline rights-of-way.

Corrosion Prevention
Next to excavation accidents, corrosion is the next most common cause of pipeline spills. The pipeline industry has developed a range of technologies to eliminate or reduce corrosion.

Cathodic protection is required on all interstate pipelines, and has been for decades. (This technique uses a constant low voltage electrical current run through the pipeline to counteract corrosion.)
Recent improvements in pipeline coating materials also help reduce the risk of a corrosion-related failure.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is revising the pipeline safety regulations to incorporate more stringent corrosion prevention rules - a change supported by the oil pipeline industry.

Pigs and Smart Pigs
Pigs are cylinder shaped plugs of the same diameter as a particular pipeline. Two important accident prevention purposes of pigs include:

Detecting potential leaks before they can happen. Smart pigs are fitted with sophisticated electronic sensors that can help locate some pipeline wall weaknesses before they can progress to the point of causing a leak.
Scraping build-up off the interior wall of the pipeline to help prevent interior corrosion.

Central Coordination and Control
Pipeline systems are operated from highly computerized control centers which coordinate operations throughout the system - everything from rate of flow, to pressure, to opening and closing valves. The control centers also monitor devices that can alert operators to abrupt changes in operating parameters, providing a detection mechanism for fast response to emergency conditions. Satellite and telecommunications links connect control centers with facilities along pipelines to assure rapid response and constant monitoring of pipeline conditions.

Training
Pipeline companies constantly train control room operators and maintenance personnel for their specific pipeline systems. Each pipeline is unique, custom built to match the specific terrain, products and other factors that are peculiar to a system's operations. Safety drills are conducted so that operators and emergency response personnel know the details of their unique system.

This training and safety drilling is designed to protect against the human factors that can either cause accidents or make them worse once they happen. A new set of even more stringent qualification procedures has been adopted following a joint safety improvement effort between pipeline companies and the federal Office of Pipeline Safety.

AOPL offers a position paper on the topic of pipeline operator qualification and certification.

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