In this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, host Russel Treat is joined by Brooks Shannon and April Heinze of NENA – the National Emergency Number Association to discuss 911 for pipeline emergencies.

Listen to the episode now to learn what you need to know about practical implementation of the rupture notification rule – particularly the requirement to notify 911 centers.

The episode also covers NENA and its outreach programs, as well as their Enhanced PSAP Registry and Census and its importance. 

911 for Pipeline Emergencies Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms:

• Brooks Shannon is the Interoperability Program Manager at NENA. Connect with Brooks on LinkedIn.
• April Heinze is the  911 and PSAP operations director at NENA. Connect with April on LinkedIn.
  • NENA The 9-1-1 Association is the only non-profit professional organization solely focused on 9-1-1 operations, technology, education, and policy issues. Their mission is to empower our members and the greater 9-1-1 community to provide the best possible emergency response through standards development, training, thought leadership, outreach, and advocacy.
• API (American Petroleum Institute) represents all segments of America’s natural gas and oil industry. API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
• Valve and Rupture Rule is a newly updated PHMSA regulation. This rule establishes requirements for rupture-mitigation valves, such as spacing, maintenance and inspection, and risk analysis. The final rule also requires operators of gas and hazardous liquid pipelines to contact 9-1-1 emergency call centers immediately upon notification of a potential rupture and conduct post-rupture investigations and reviews.
• A public-safety answering point (PSAP), sometimes called public-safety access point, is a call center where emergency/non-emergency calls initiated by any mobile or landline subscriber are terminated.
• Enhanced PSAP Registry and Census a geospatial, GIS based data set of 911 PSAP jurisdictional boundaries with associated contact information, including 10-digit priority numbers. 
• The San Bruno or PG&E Incident in September 2010 refers to a ruptured pipeline operated by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. The rupture created a crater near San Bruno, California, caused an explosion after natural gas was released and ignited, and resulted in fires causing loss to life and property.
• The Marshall Incident refers to the Enbridge Incorporated Hazardous Liquid Rupture and Release, which occurred on July 25, 2010, in Marshall, Michigan. Read the full NTSB Accident Report.
• NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is an independent Federal agency charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident in the United States and significant accidents in other modes of transportation – railroad, highway, marine, and pipeline.

911 for Pipeline Emergencies Full Episode Transcript:

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast” episode 294, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, compliance and operations software for the pipeline control center to address control room management, SCADA, and audit readiness. Find out more about POEMS at EnersysCorp.com.

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we are giving away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode.

This week, our winner is Chuck Kanoy with Northeast Ohio Natural Gas. Congratulations, Chuck. Your YETI’s on its way. To learn how you can win this prize, stick around until the end of the episode.

This week, we will speak to Brooks Shannon and April Heinz with the National Emergency Number Association. For those of you that are working to implement and practically implement the rupture notification rule, and particularly the requirement to contact 911 centers, this episode is designed for you.

Brooks. April. Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Brooks Shannon: Thank you for having us.

April Heinz: Yeah, we really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

Russel: I think this is a great opportunity for me, as well. I met Brooks at the API Pipeline Conference here a couple of months ago. We’ve been working to get this organized. I’m really interested to have the conversation.

Brooks and April are with NENA. Maybe a good place to start is to ask you guys what is NENA and what are your roles there?

April: NENA, the 911 Association, is an association that is specifically dedicated to the hard working 911 professionals across the United States and, actually, beyond. We have chapters in Canada and Mexico. Then, we have sister organizations in Europe and Australia, as well.

Our responsibility is to create standards and best practices, along with training, education, and government advocacy for the 911 community.

Russel: April, what’s your role at NENA?

April: My role, I am the 911 and PSAP operations director. That’s a big, fancy title to say that I’m responsible for oversight of our operational standards development. Then I am the subject matter expert, I myself spent 24 years in a 911 center, also known as a PSAP or Public Safety Answering Point.

As a subject matter expert, I oftentimes speak at various different conferences, and meetings, and so on, as well as work with all kinds of different government entities in the realm of 911.

Russel: Brooks, same question for you. What’s your role at NENA?

Brooks: Sure. My role at NENA is I am NENA’s interoperability program manager. What that means is I work on technical programs that facilitate interagency interoperability, that’s 911 PSAP to 911 PSAP, as well as helping entities that are not PSAPs in our work with 911.

So making it easier for people to contact 911 perhaps outside of the usual circumstances in which someone picks up a phone and dials 911 because they are having an emergency. We want to make sure that we have access to 911 available anytime, anywhere, regardless of how you want to access it. The programs I worked on help facilitate that.

Russel: You mentioned some of the things you do around training and advocacy, and that sort of thing. What are some of the other things you do to accomplish the mission for NENA?

April: NENA actually hosts three different conferences a year. We kick off the year with our Standards and Best Practices Conference, which has a special focus on all of the standards and best practices that we create.

At that conference, we work on some of those standards and best practices, but we also educate on the new ones that have been developed.

The next one of the conferences that NENA puts together is our 911 Goes to Washington event. February or March, it depends on the year, we have hundreds of 911 professionals that descend on DC, and we go and speak to our congressmen and senators about issues that we are facing in the 911 industry.

Then our last conference of the year is our annual conference. Our annual conference is also a trade show, and we have somewhere around 3,000 attendees that come to our conference for education and the trade show itself. Those are three things that we put together every year.

In addition to the operational standards, we develop a lot of technical standards. The technical standards are basically how our vendor partners in the 911 community create…We set the standards for them to create the products and services that the 911 professionals use on a day in and day out basis.

Russel: That actually tees up another question for me. That is, what is the nature of the 911 center? Let me build a little context. We’re talking to pipeliners. Pipeliners, on rare occasions, have a need to contact 911.

We’re all members of the public. We have whatever preconceived notions we have about how 911 works. Maybe it would be helpful if you guys explained how 911 actually works.

April: Sure. That’s actually one of my favorite topics.

What a 911 center…what they do. Obviously, they answer 911 calls, but most of the 911 centers in the United States have multi-functions. What they’re often called is an emergency communications center.

They will answer 911 calls, but they also have non-emergency calls that they have to process. About a third of their workload actually comes in via 911 phone calls. Texts, it could be texts. Then, eventually, we’ll also receive some other forms of calls, I guess, as you would still consider it a call to the 911 center. Notifications, mainly, of emergencies.

The non-emergency calls are about two thirds of the call volume in a 911 center. Not only do they process calls, but they also typically dispatch the responders. It’s their responsibility to not just gather the data that the responders are going to need, but then they also mitigate that response. They are the command and control center for all of your emergency responders.

They not only, like I said, have to be trained in how to answer 911 calls and provide pre-arrival instructions, which oftentimes they have added training for because we…Any of the protocol providers that are used, they must do at least a 40 hour training to be able to utilize those protocols.

They also then have to be trained on how to dispatch the various different responding agencies. 911 centers can be really small, so it may just be a small city that’s being handled or a small county where it’s sparsely populated, or they can be very, very large.

The urban 911 centers often handle multi-million populations, so if you’re talking about Houston in particular, I believe, if I remember right, there are somewhere like over three million people in the city of Houston. That 911 center answers the calls, and then transfers the calls to the appropriate dispatch points.

Other 911 centers answer the calls and dispatch and do all of the various different, other functions that emergency communications centers do. 911 is what they consider a local entity. It really depends on the local agency having jurisdiction. It could be a city. It could be a county. It could be the entire state, because we do have some statewide systems.

That entity determines what level of service they’re going to provide for their constituents.

It gets kind of complicated. A lot of people think when they pick up the phone and dial 911, they’re actually speaking to a police officer, or a firefighter, or an EMT, or a paramedic. That is not the case.

911 professionals are their own…It is their own profession. They are emergency communicators by trade. They are trained at a very high level to be able to do the jobs that they do.

Russel: I think that’s really important to understand, is that a 911 person is really…They’re a dispatch coordinator. They get a call, they’re looking to initiate a response. They’re going to be asking questions about who do I need to send, what do I need to send, where do I need to send them? That kind of thing.

We’re going to get to this in a bit when we talk about the rupture rule. It’s kind of a whole different kind of problem. It’s somewhat far outside of the 911 rubric, what the pipeline operators are being asked to do.

April: Absolutely. The new rule is for potential problems. 911 doesn’t handle potential problems. They are in the business of taking the call and doing something with that call.

When pipeline operators are going to…if they contact them when they’re not…They don’t necessarily want them to do anything with the information until such time as they’ve confirmed, one way or another, that 911 has to do something with that information.

Russel: It’s a little like, “I’m calling because my dad’s getting on a ladder, getting up and hanging the Christmas lights. I want you to know he might fall, so you need to be ready.”

April: Exactly.

Russel: The 911 operator’s going to say, “Thank you very much,” and then, click, hang up because they need to talk to somebody that actually needs something done.

April: “Why are you calling in?”

Russel: I guess the next thing I want to talk about is how is jurisdiction determined? I know you mentioned Houston. What I know about Houston, you said there’s three million people in the city of Houston.

If you talk about the greater Houston area, it’s in five counties. There are probably a dozen communities, some of which are completely surrounded by Houston. Knowing which first responder needs to be sent to what location is very much a non-trivial thing for 911.

April: Absolutely. I’m really glad you mentioned that. When you have an emergency, you…Talking about Houston, they have a 911 authority. It’s Greater Harris County. Greater Harris County, I believe, has somewhere around 42 different 911 centers in that county for the state of Texas.

In that county, Houston does take up a good chunk of it with this city, but what happens is if you have a precise location, you can then send the appropriate responders. Like I said, 911 and public safety in general, are a local entity. You’re going to have these jurisdictional boundaries drawn based on the community having jurisdiction.

It could be a township that has the jurisdiction, in which you may have a township police department, a township fire department, and a township EMS agency. It could be a county that has the jurisdiction or it could be a city.

What happens is each of those have their boundaries drawn around whatever their…What is that geographical boundary, those…?

Russel: A geofence.

April: Yes, thank you. Geofence. That’s the word I wanted I was really struggling with.

They all have their own little geofence. If you go outside of that, it’s somebody else’s jurisdiction. Let me just tell you, fire departments and law enforcement departments are very territorial about their jurisdictions..

We have to pinpoint more of a location, so if you have a situation that says, “It’s between point A and point B,” and point A and point B may be a five mile span, that five mile span in Greater Harris County may transverse multiple different 911 centers and fire or law enforcement departments.

What will have to happen is multiples will get sent to look for whatever the situation is between point A and point B. The pipeline operators will have to determine which PSAPs are involved because the rule says they have to call the appropriate 911 centers.

If point A is in jurisdiction A, and point B is in jurisdiction B, and it transverses PSAP jurisdiction C, you’ve got to call all of them.

Russel: Yeah, that is the problem right there. The other thing I would say, I know of situations in Houston…There’s one place where there’s an intersection. The jurisdictional boundaries meet in the middle of the intersection. It depends on where your car stops who will respond.

April: That’s normal. That’s very normal. Just about every 911 center, every law enforcement or fire agency, they all have those jurisdictional boundaries. They’re always drawn right down the center of the road. Never does it say, “OK, you can have that entire road, and then we’ll just start off on the other side.” That does not happen.

Russel: [laughs] Sorry.

April: I know. It’s funny, isn’t it?

Russel: Really, it is. In the moment, and if you’re in that situation, it’s not funny at all, but it’s just one of those weird things.

This tees up…We’ve been talking around it. I want to get Brooks to chime in on this a little bit. The requirements of the new rupture rule, there’re two fundamental problems with it, or challenge is maybe a better way to say that.

One is, you’ve got to notify of a potential rupture. The 911 centers don’t really know what to do with that. The other is, you’ve got to notify the appropriate 911 centers. Even if you know in a moment of time what the appropriate jurisdictional centers are for your pipeline, it’s going to change over time because not only are those jurisdictional boundaries complex, they’re moving around.

What is NENA’s role in that reality?

Brooks: That’s a really, really great point. Those boundaries are not fixed. They change over time through annexations or consolidation of centers for cost saving reasons or other political reasons.

If you operate a control room and you’ve gone out and you’ve surveyed the jurisdictions that cover your infrastructure, that may be good for a little while, but that could change, much less the contact information for those PSAPs could change over time, as well.

At NENA, one of the things we’ve done to broaden access to emergency services is we’ve created something called the Enhanced PSAP Registry and Census. What that is, it’s a geospatial, GIS based data set of those 911 PSAP jurisdictional boundaries with associated contact information.

You can identify, at any given location in the United States, which 911 center or centers are responsible for calls at that location.

It’s just as easy as searching the data by however you would search for locations through a commodity mapping application that we all use today, Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc., works the same way.

You can search for locations and you can drill down and you can find information about the 911 PSAPs, including 24/7 contact numbers that you can dial to reach emergency assistance.

That’s one of the things we try to do at NENA is to equip people whether or not you are a 911 PSAP staffer or you are working within the oil and gas pipeline sector. If you need to contact 911, and it’s not where you’re located, we try to make that as easy as possible for you.

Russel: Very much a non-trivial thing. How do you keep that type of thing updated? How does that even work given the number of 911 centers there are in the United States?

Brooks: It’s a very great question because we have nearly 6,000 of them across the United States. We rely on those 911 centers to reach out to us when their data changes, but we also proactively reach out to them to establish relationships and to encourage them to share not only updated data, but the best data they have.

Not just any boundary, but the actual GIS boundary that the city or the county or the state or their local authority produces, as well as not just a non-emergency number, but a number that is answered by priority because the last thing you want to do in an emergency is call a 911 PSAP and get stuck on hold for 10 minutes while they’re answering 911 calls.

We try to do a lot of productive outreach to encourage the PSAPs to share that kind of data with us.

Russel: What is the current level of awareness in the 911 community about the new pipeline rupture mitigation and response rule?

April: It’s kind of a mixed bag. We have sent outreach out to our members. I created my own, actually, as soon as we learned about the new rule. By the way, 911 wasn’t consulted about the new rule, which is one of the reasons why we’re struggling with the whole potential discussion.

As soon as we learned about it, we have our own magazine, so I wrote an article, put it in our magazine. We are also doing various different sessions and educational outreach at all of our conferences. It’s slowly trickling out there, but it is not 100 percent.

That said, rule requirements were that the pipeline operators were to also establish connectivity with the 911 centers, create liaisons between them and the pipeline operators, and obtain information directly to them. How we learned about this new rule was we actually had a very large pipeline operator reach out to us.

They noticed our enhanced PSAP registry and census and they started asking questions. They told us why they were asking the questions, and that led to us getting involved in making sure that our 911 centers were aware of it. That said, I don’t think that that’s necessarily the case for all pipeline operators.

Russel: It’s definitely not.

April: It’s not the case, yeah. I found that it’s definitely not the case.

Russel: I know. It’s a big challenge. There’s a lot of different kinds of pipeline operators. You got the big lines that are doing long haul transmission and you’ve got the big utility companies, and their needs are different. It’s a challenge, to say the least. It’s a challenge.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that that rulemaking was done without talking to any 911 centers about how they actually operate. Has NENA reached out to PHMSA and had any conversation with PHMSA about that rule and how it might be made more appropriate?

April: We actually did have some conversations with a few folks at PHMSA after the fact. 911, at a federal level, has a 911 office that, believe it or not, is through the Department of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA. Guess where PHMSA is under? They’re under DoT as well.

They now have a direct connection with each other after this ruling because we reached out to the 911 program office and said, “Did you guys know about this?” and they said, “No.” Then we reached PHMSA and PHMSA was like, “Oh, yeah. Hi, we didn’t know you were even part of DoT.” Long story short, there was some inter connectivity that happened after that. We have had a few conversations with folks at PHMSA.

Russel: That’s good. Certainly, rules are written…There’s a reason this rule is in there. There’s a reason the 911 centers are roped in. It comes out of the San Bruno incident, in particular, and some of the NTSB findings and recommendations. There’s a reason why they’re doing this, but it doesn’t really contemplate what 911 actually does.

I’m going to say something and I want to hear your…This is what I believe to be true. I’d like to hear your response to it. What I believe to be true is when PHMSA was writing the rule, they were thinking about emergency response in terms of formulating a command center.

What you’re doing, is you’re talking to the agency to let them know that, “Hey, I’m just giving you a heads up. You may need to formulate a command.” That’s not what 911 centers do. That’s a different function. Have I got that right? Do you think I’ve got that accurate?

April: I think that there’s a little bit more to it than that because one, there were five different incidents that PHMSA cited as to why this happened, one of which was Calhoun County, Michigan or Marshall, Michigan, just the county south of where I live.

I know the way that that incident happened, part of the problem is that they had the loss of pressure. They knew that there was a problem but they couldn’t find it. I think what they really think is that the more eyes on a situation, the better.

The problem is just getting…Maybe. I don’t know exactly why PHMSA did it. I don’t know if it’s really setting up a command center because, quite frankly, that happened pretty dang quickly.

In the emergency response world, you can get a command center up and running very quickly. The only problem is that the command center happens after the emergency.

Russel: Yeah, it’s a post incident thing.

April: Yeah. When that happens, that piece happens, like I said, pretty rapidly. Then, it’s all of this response after the fact. I know with the Marshall incident, that took literally almost 12 months to get that completely stopped. It was just a big, big mess.

What I think here, I think the idea…I assume the idea was that they want to get people out there helping to look for the potential…

Russel: That’s actually a really good point because with a lot of incidents on pipelines, the pipeline will know they have something going on but they don’t know what it is and where it is until somebody calls them.

What they’re trying to do is make sure that anything that comes into a 911 center gets connected for the pipeline. That’s what they’re trying to address.

April: I think this may not be a bad thing. I think that if you have this situation, obviously there’s some sort of a problem. Fire departments can respond. They’ve got…especially rural fire departments, they’ve got a lot of people that they could get out looking, pounding the pavement. They just need to know where.

The more information you can provide, the better, but to expect 911 to do nothing with the information until such time as the pipeline operator says, “Oh, yes. It definitely is a problem,” or, “No, guess what? It really isn’t a problem.” That’s just not going to happen.

They have to do something. They’re going to have to turn it over to the local fire departments because that’s who is going to get dispatched to these types of situations. They’re going to send it to the fire department. They’re going to at least say, “Hey, Chief. We’ve got this. We’ve got this report.”

How they handle it is going to be up to them on a local level. They may tone it out and treat it just like everything else, or they may contact somebody who’s on duty, or the fire chief of the rural departments and say, “This is what’s going on.”

It will be up to the command officers to determine, “Are we going to get boots on the ground? Go out there. Pound the pavement. See if we can find something,” or not. It’s really going to be important that pipeline operators are talking to the locals.

Russel: Yeah. That’s very much a non-\trivial thing, to even know who those people are and how to engage them. Operators want to do that, but it’s challenging. It’s very challenging, particularly when you’re impacting a lot of jurisdictions. It’s simpler if you’re dealing with just one jurisdiction. If you’re dealing with many, it’s tough.

April: In this situation, if you have to notify 911, that’s why you have these databases like NENA’s Enhanced PSAP Registry and Census. I know there’s a handful of others out there.

You need to have a tool like that so that you can at least say, “All right, I’ve got some semblance of a location. Who do I notify?” The 911 centers can…Once you’ve notified the 911 centers, they will dispatch the appropriate people.

Russel: True. All true. I think there’s a lot that we’ve got to do, both in the pipeline world and in the 911 world to understand, what are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to accomplish that? Build some policy, procedure, and practice for that. We’re really very raw, very early in that conversation.

April: That’s a valid point. Actually, within the PHMSA rules, it does say you’re supposed to have this manual. That manual is…You need to know how we are going to respond to these things.

When you contact a 911 center, there are specific things the 911 center is going to need to know. If it comes from a technician out in the field, they’ve already identified something. Maybe there’s a technician that’s checking something and they’ve found that there’s a problem.

At that point, they dial 911 because it’s going to go to the appropriate jurisdiction, but they still need to provide them with, “I work for X Pipeline Operator. My name is John Smith. This is what’s happening.” Be very specific. This is what’s happening and responders need to know that it’s whatever type of liquid or non-liquid, if it’s…

Russel: You guys have a rubric or a form that says these are the things the 911 center needs to know?

April: 911 is going to ask specific questions, yes.

Russel: We should get that and put it up on our website as a resource to people who listen to this episode and try to look at their policies and make sure they’re capturing all the right information. I think that would be helpful.

April: I mentioned that that’s what happens with a technician. The technician’s actually out on the ground, but when it comes to an actual control center, that’s going to be a little different, because the control center’s not going to have all of the same information. They’re not going to be the person that, in the event that you are sending responders, who are they going to contact?

They’re going to ask more things, but it’s also going to be…There are some things that may be incumbent upon that pipeline operator to know.

This is the most important one. Providing any cautionary information that responders need to know about the situation is going to be very crucial. If it is a hazardous material and they need to wear breathing apparatus or something like that, they definitely need to pass that information on.

Russel: Brooks, I want to come back and talk a little bit more about the PSAP registry. For the pipeline control centers, I think most control centers are aware of this, but the reality is if they call 911 from the control center, they’re going to get the local jurisdiction for the building they’re sitting in, not the jurisdiction for the responder that they need.

One of the values of the PSAP registry is you have the full, 10 digit phone numbers for those 911 centers.

Brooks: Exactly.

Russel: Are those calls typically answered the same way, or do they know it’s coming in on something other than 911?

Brooks: They’ll know it’s coming in on something other than 911. The numbers that we ask a PSAP to share with us are ideally numbers that are answered with priority. They will be answered by a call taker along the same priority as a 911 call.

Now, it is dependent on 911 centers to choose appropriate numbers to share with us. For a small center, they may just have one number. That might be the non-emergency number.

That might be the number that they also answer with priority, sometimes, when someone calls that, whether or not that’s someone calling from an oil or gas pipeline operator, or that’s someone calling from an alarm company, so on and so forth.

A small, rural 911 PSAP will operate that way, but for larger PSAPs that can separate their numbers into general public non-emergency numbers and those that could be answered with priority.

That’s where something like the new Enhanced PSAP Registry and Census can be brought to bear because it can collect those numbers and it provides those numbers to someone who does need to reach out to a PSAP and not wait on hold for minutes on end.

April, was there anything that you might want to add to that?

April: No. Typically, when it comes to the difference between a 10 digit line, though, and a 911 line is that a 10 digit line, really, they’ll maybe get caller ID, but they’re not going to get any other data.

Where 911 is concerned, we get data. There’s location information that comes in with the call. There’s the callback number. There’s the name of the party and other data that can be associated with that call.

It’s really going to be important that you understand, when you’re dialing a 10 digit line, you’re going to have to have the information for us. It’s not just going to be automatically provided.

Russel: That’s a really good point. That’s something that pipeline operators certainly need to keep top of mind and have a rubric for that is handy.

One of the things that we have been talking to NENA about, my companies have been talking to you guys about, is building an application for pipeliners that streamlines that look up and streamlines their ability to make those calls and provide the right information.

I perceive there’s a need for that. I’m doing a shout out to my audience and asking the question of, is that something you think would be of value? I’d certainly like to know, and if you think it would, I’d really appreciate it if you went to the Pipeline Podcast Network, the contact us form, and just drop me a note and say, “Yeah, Russel. I think that’s a good idea,” or, “Russel, you’re crazy. We have other ways of doing that.”

That would be helpful for me, for sure.

Let’s try to bring this…wrap this up. What do you think the key takeaways for pipeliners ought to be? I’ll make a first stab. I think one key takeaway is that 911 centers are…They get a call. They do an action. They’re not really there to receive information and park it someplace. They’re very action oriented. That’s one key takeaway.

Another key takeaway is that jurisdictions are complicated and changing and you need a way to know who to call. My other takeaway is when you call, particularly if you’re calling something other than 911, you need some tools so that you make sure that you get them all the information they’re going to require.

April: Another takeaway that I would definitely recommend is to try to pinpoint the location as precisely as you can. We recognize in these rules that you may receive a sensor data that goes off, and that sensor may cover a span, a specific location, but the more precise the location you can provide us, the better it will be.

If it’s a 20 mile span, that’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. I recognize that you may not have anything better than that. If that’s all you’ve got, then definitely give it to us, but do as precise of a location pinpoint as you possibly can. That’s going to be very important.

Russel: Again, it’s non-trivial because the 20 miles pipe segment is a lot more common than I can tell you exactly where I need you to go look or go show up. Brooks, anything from you to add on, wrapping this up?

Brooks: The only thing I think I would add is to reinforce the notion that PSAP information changes over time. It’s not static. If you, as a pipeline operator, have done work to reach out to the PSAPs in your area, determine what their area of coverage is, the jurisdictions, determine what their contact information is, that needs to be refreshed.

You should look at reaching out to them, probably twice a year, to double check that and be aware that there could be consolidations and centers that require you to reach out to new people. That can be a little tricky, but it’s important to know that that data changes over time.

Russel: Absolutely. I think that’s critical to understand. Guys, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. There’s a lot of information here. You’re making my head hurt a little bit, actually. That’s a good thing.

I think it would be interesting to see, in another 12 or 18 months, where we are with our understanding of this rule and how it is maturing on the 911 side. I would say, if you need somebody that can talk about control rooms and talk to your constituency, I’d certainly be open to doing that, if it would be helpful.

April: We appreciate that.

Russel: Thanks again for taking your time.

Brooks: Thank you, Russel. Thanks for having us.

April: Thank you so much, Russel.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with April and Brooks. Just a reminder, before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit PipelinePodcastNetwork.com/Win and enter yourself in the drawing.

Please support the podcast by leaving us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, or wherever you happen to listen. You can find instructions at PipelinePodcastNetwork.com.

If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in hearing us talk about, please let me know on the Contact Us page at PipelinePodcastNetwork.com, or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

Transcription by CastingWords