The Department of Transportation’s Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) moved quickly into a “response mode” following the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, contacting pipeline companies to determine the level of preparedness within the industry, said a top OPS official last week. In the end, it was judged to be “very good.”

“I personally called the CEOs [and] told them who from our organization would call them,” said Stacey Gerard, associate administrator of the OPS, which has jurisdiction over interstate natural gas and hazardous liquids pipelines. The agency’s regional directors then contacted the interstate pipeline owners to determine if “they had adequate security measures in place.” In addition, OPS “reached out to our state counterparts,” which added “350 strong” to help check on the level of pipeline security.

The “primary focus” of the agency in the wake of the World Trade Center and Pentagon strikes was to determine which pipeline facilities were the “most critical,” where they were located, and “how [could] pipelines be used against us” to harm people and the environment, Gerard told the Natural Gas Roundtable in Washington, DC last Thursday.

“It so happened that the brain trust of pipeline safety was all in…Boulder, CO, on 9/11. [So] we opened our little black books, our laptops and tried to deal with the problem the way we do best on a day-in, day-out basis.” The OPS “instinctively applied all those lessons” that it learned on the safety side to “how we were approaching solutions to the security problems,” she said.

The information supplied by the pipelines was included in three reports, which were “labeled…law enforcement sensitive” and forwarded to the department, she noted. The OPS had to ask “a lot of strange questions that we haven’t asked before” of executives of pipe facilities that were deemed to be the most critical. For example, the agency wanted to know “how prepared they were, what they were thinking of and where they thought assistance [was most needed].”

To further assist pipelines, Gerard said the agency worked with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ease the no-flight restrictions so that pipes could conduct aerial security inspections of their systems. The OPS also was in contact with the U.S. Coast Guard in Boston to “deal with their concerns about bringing LNG” into Boston Harbor.

In the event pipelines weren’t well prepared, Gerard said that OPS determined — after reviewing its regulatory and statutory authority — that it could order companies to take the necessary action to step up their security. “But we found that appropriate action was being taken, and we did not have to resort to that.”

As with many federal agencies, the terrorist attacks expanded the responsibilities of the OPS. Before Sept. 11, it was primarily responsible for the safe operation of pipelines, she said, but now security preparedness has been added to its plate. “We’ve always in OPS thought that safety and security were very closely interwoven, but security was kind of like [a] punctuation at the end of the sentence. It wasn’t something that we had solidly focused on with our lens straight on it.”

Asked if OPS intended to beef up its staff in light of its added duties, Gerard said that the Bush administration had requested “significantly increased resources for our office” for this fiscal year, even prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. “So we were expecting to add resources anyway.”

As for the pipeline companies’ role, she noted that OPS has called on industry to form task forces to help identify the “best practices” to protect pipelines, share that information within the industry and to monitor the progress. “We intend to have a link with those task forces, and to establish a reporting structure.”

Gerard further said the OPS intends to contact several pipeline industry executives soon to get their take on security issues. “We’re…going to act for the [DOT] secretary to call several of you [this] week at the executive level and get your policy recommendations on where we need to go, what your concerns are, [and] how to integrate with the rest of the federal family” on security preparedness.

From her perspective, she believes interstate natural gas and oil pipelines will have to address issues such as “mobilizing law enforcement,” and developing “national criteria for levels of alert when the government gets [a] warning,” as well as identifying the types of practices that should be generally implemented during such times.

She noted that the DOT is working with the newly formed Office of Homeland Security. “The department certainly has connections and communications with that initiative, and I think we’re being asked to add staff to that effort,” she told natural gas executives.

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