House bill to tighten gas line regulations is introduced

Standing at the crater that marks ground zero of the gas explosion that recently devastated this community, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) announced legislation Monday that would mandate stricter regulations of gas pipelines nationwide.

Among other requirements, the Pipeline Safety and Community Empowerment Act of 2010, which Speier plans to introduce Tuesday, would require the installation of automatic or remote shutoff valves in areas of high seismic hazard and on pipelines in other areas deemed high risk.

The provision is similar to one in legislation introduced last week by U.S. Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. The Senate bill would demand such valves “wherever technically or economically feasible,” however, and Speier’s legislation would require them wherever the secretary of Transportation deems them technologically feasible.

“I don’t think economics should play a role,” Speier said Monday, flanked by the San Bruno fire and police chiefs and the city’s vice mayor and assistant city manager. “How many fewer lives would have been lost? How many fewer homes?”

Like the Senate bill, Speier’s bill would mandate use of internal inspection devices, called pigs, or comparable methods deemed equally effective in detecting corrosion, pipe stress and “otherwise providing for the safety of the pipeline.”

Pigs, which move through interiors of pipelines with sensors, are considered the most reliable way to detect internal corrosion and flaws. However, Pacific Gas & Electric, which owns and operates the ruptured high-pressure transmission line, was unable to use in-line inspection devices in the pipeline because of changes in its diameter at various points. It was installed in 1956.

If a pipe cannot be inspected with those technologies, Speier’s bill would prohibit its operation at high pressure.

It took utility officials an hour and 46 minutes to turn off the gas feeding the Sept. 9 inferno because the line had manual shutoff valves. After a meeting with PG&E on Monday afternoon, Speier said, officials informed her that there are two automatic shutoff valves in her district and nine remote shut-off valves. The 20 valves on the line that ruptured are manual, she said.

Speier’s legislation would mandate disclosure to homeowners of transmission line locations if they are within 2,000 feet of such lines; add risk of seismic activity and age of the pipeline to the factors used to determine whether pipelines are deemed high risk; mandate that gas line operators provide pipeline location information and emergency response plans to regulators and emergency responders; mandate oversight of “public education programs” by pipeline owners and operators; and require that pipeline safety standards be made available free to the public.

Separate from her legislation, Speier said that she asked PG&E to remove its transmission line from the Crestmoor neighborhood, where the explosion occurred, and that the company is “looking at alternatives.”

Fire Chief Dennis Haag spoke Monday in favor of the bill, saying that if an automatic or remote shutoff valve had been in place, firefighters could have gone on the offensive immediately. “We were in defensive mode,” he said of the blaze, which took seven lives and destroyed 37 homes.

But Donald Santa, president of the Interstate Natural Gas Assn. of America, said the public would best be served if reforms were instituted after the exact cause of the blast is determined.

The cause remains under investigation. Speier noted Monday that among the factors being explored is whether power was restarted properly after an outage the day of the blast.

A Times investigation published Monday revealed that PG&E’s leak rate was six times that of other operators of comparable size. Responding to the article, Speier said the state’s investigation should start with the California Public Utilities Commission.

“If [PG&E] had had six times as many leaks, regulators should have been out there asking why,” she said.

lee.romney@latimes.com