This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features returning guest John Erickson of the American Public Gas Association (APGA) discussing the lessons learned from gas utility incidents to help support pipeline safety.

In this episode, you will learn about the importance of having procedures in place in the event of an accident, how to handle the situation if a gas utility incident occurs, and why you need to equip your team with effective decision-making skills for when the unexpected occurs.

Gas Utility Incidents Lessons Learned: Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• John Erickson is adviser emeritus with the American Public Gas Association. He is president of Safety and Compliance Evaluation and COO for the APGA Security and Integrity Foundation (SIF). Connect with John on LinkedIn.
  • American Public Gas Association (APGA) is the national association for municipal gas utilities in the United States.
• AGA (American Gas Association) represents companies delivering natural gas safely, reliably, and in an environmentally responsible way to help improve the quality of life for their customers every day. AGA’s mission is to provide clear value to its membership and serve as the indispensable, leading voice and facilitator on its behalf in promoting the safe, reliable, and efficient delivery of natural gas to homes and businesses across the nation.
• AEGIS (Associated Electric and Gas Insurance System) is a leading mutual insurance company that provides liability and property coverage, as well as related risk management services, to the energy industry.
• PHSMA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) ensures the safe transportation of energy and hazardous materials.
• Integrity Management (Pipeline Integrity Management) is a systematic approach to operate and manage pipelines in a safe manner that complies with PHMSA regulations.
  • CFR 192 provides regulatory guidance on the pipeline transport of natural gas.
• Pipeline SMS (Pipeline Safety Management Systems) or PSMS is an industry-wide focus to improve pipeline safety, driving toward zero incidents.
  • Angie Kolar is a chair on the Pipeline SMS Working Group and recently provided an update on Pipeline SMS. [Download the Presentation]
• The Operator Qualification Rule (OQ Rule) refers to the 49 CFR Parts 192 and 195 requirements for pipeline operators to develop a qualification program to evaluate an individual’s ability to react to abnormal operating conditions (AOCs) that may occur while performing tasks.
  • AOC (Abnormal Operating Condition) is defined by the 49 CFR Subpart 195.503 as a condition identified by a pipeline operator that may indicate a malfunction of a component or deviation from normal operations that may indicate a condition exceeding design limits or result in a hazard(s) to persons, property, or the environment.
    • Part 192, Subpart N is the minimum requirement for operator qualification of individuals performing covered tasks on a pipeline facility.
• NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) is a U.S. government agency responsible for the safe transportation through Aviation, Highway, Marine, Railroad, and Pipeline. The entity investigates incidents and accidents involving transportation and also makes recommendations for safety improvements.
• JJ’s Restaurant Incident occurred on February 19, 2013, when a construction crew working for a cable TV company struck a gas pipeline outside of a restaurant in Kansas City, Missouri. The gas drifted from the broken line into the restaurant, causing an explosion.
• Bellingham Incident (Olympic Pipeline explosion) occurred on June 10, 1999, when a gas pipeline ruptured near Whatcom Creek in Bellingham, Wash., causing deaths and injuries. Three deaths included 18-year-old Liam Wood and 10-year-olds Stephen Tsiorvas and Wade King.
  • Listen to Larry Shelton discuss his first-hand account of the incident in episode 79 of the Pipeliners Podcast.

Gas Utility Incidents Lessons Learned: Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat:  Welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast, episode 139, sponsored by Burns & McDonnell, delivering pipeline projects with an integrated construction and design mindset, connecting all the project elements — design, procurement, sequencing — at the site. Burns & McDonnell uses its vast knowledge, the latest technology, and an ownership commitment to safely deliver innovative, quality projects. Learn how Burns & McDonnell is on-site through it all at burnsmcd.com.

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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 the appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener each episode. This week, our winner is Bob Fenton with Tallgrass Energy. Congratulations, Bob, your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize pack, stick around until the end of the episode.

This week, John Erickson with APGA, the American Public Gas Association, returns to talk about lessons learned from gas utility incidents. John, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

John Erickson:  Great. Glad to be here.

Russel:  I’m excited about this episode. I think this is something that the listeners will have particular interest in. You have some unique experience around, particularly gas utility incidents. I’ve asked you to come on to share your experience and talk about some of the things you’ve seen and learned over the years. Let me start by asking you what is your experience with utility incidents?

John:  I worked for the American Gas Association for 16 years. In ’96, they were reducing in size. I took the buyout and figured I have a year to find out when I’m going to get another real job. I started getting calls from AGA members asking if I could help them out on certain projects. One of them was a gas accident case in Pennsylvania.

I started working with attorneys, advising them on whether, in my opinion, the utility involved had followed industry standards of care and regulations in the facts that were related to the case. I guess they liked what I did.

They recommended me to some other attorneys, and ended up working with three attorneys who were the outside counsel for the Associated Electric and Gas Insurance System (AEGIS). When there’s a big accident, anyone insured by AEGIS, AEGIS gets involved. If pipeline safety codes and standards were at question, they would call me up and ask if I’d help.

It’s been a side business of mine, not something I intended to do. I’ve probably worked on 60 to 70 cases, testified through deposition in probably 20 or 25. Five or six cases have gone to court. I get to see a lot of different variety of accidents and also see what kind of claims the plaintiffs’ attorneys will make, which sometimes are a little bit of a stretch.

Russel:  [laughs] Well, yes. That’s probably a subject for a cocktail after a conference more so than a podcast. [laughs]

John:  Right.

Russel:  I’m with you. Attorneys are paid to make arguments, and they can get creative.

John:  The one that was most creative was there’s a requirement in Part 192 for continuing surveillance, which basically is integrity management. It’s looking at the records, the inspections, and determining any of your pipes are still in working condition. They said continuing surveillance meant 24/7 visual surveillance of 100 percent of your pipeline.

Russel:  Oh, my gosh.

John:  Like, “No.”

Russel:  That’s a bit of a reach.

John:  [laughs]

Russel:  After doing that many incidents, there have to be some themes that you’ve discovered. I’m wondering what those might be.

John:  They’re always going to ask for, in discovery, copies of your O&M procedures related to whatever the issue was. It’s important to take care as to what’s in your procedures and make sure your employees are trained to follow those procedures, and that they’re aware of them.

That also brings in operator qualification. If it’s an operator qualification covered task involved in the case, which there usually is, they’re going to want to look at the training records, the OQ records to prove that that person understood what they were supposed to do and were properly trained and qualified.

Also a lot of it, particularly in distribution where it may be an accident that occurs not on the utility’s pipeline but from a leak on an appliance or inside the home, the public awareness program of the utility is very critical and will be looked at through a very magnifying lens in the case.

Russel:  It’s probably true that most people that are working in a gas utility are not thinking that the procedures that they have for doing all the various tasks that they perform, if there ever is an accident or an incident that those things are going to be adjudicated. They’re going to be looked at with a fine-tooth comb.

Not only that, they’re going to be asking a whole bunch of other questions about did you follow the procedure? If not, why not?

John:  We did a study at APGA and found that 90 percent of APGA members had never had a reportable incident in the 40, what’s it been, 50 years now that PHMSA’s been collecting incident data. They might get complacent, but to have some procedures in place that in the case that an accident does occur that you’re ready to investigate it.

Controlling the site in the immediate minutes after the accident, protecting the evidence, not destroying anything, making sure you’re interviewing people, taking pictures, being prepared to do that may mean, particularly for a smaller operator, to have a consultant on call that pre-identified and worked out what they’ll do for them so that they’re ready to go in that particular case.

Russel:  That all makes sense, but that gets more and more challenging, the smaller you get.

John:  Exactly. There’s one thing in particular when post-accident, there’s a question whether did this gas come from the customer’s pipe or did it come from the utility’s pipe.

Typically, one of the first things you do after the…Obviously the fire’s put out and all the injured people are taken care of is do a pressure test of the service lines and the pipes in the area, and in many cases can prove that the utility’s property was not the source of the gas that caused this.

In some of the cases I’ve worked in, they either didn’t think about that, or didn’t have time, or in some cases because of the fire still continuing, just weren’t able to get close enough to it to be able to. Those sort of things to think about them in advance is important.

Russel:  Just a couple of key takeaways there. I want to try and summarize this is the things you do in the first minutes matter. Your procedures matter. Following those procedures matter, and being trained to follow those procedures matters. That tees up a whole ‘nother conversation that at least in my work around the control room comes up often is what is an abnormal operating condition and how do I know.

One of the challenging things in any kind of training program is it’s relatively easy to train somebody for the routine. It’s also relatively easy to train somebody for the emergency. What’s really challenging to do is to train somebody to the point they can recognize and respond to all the abnormals and head them off before they become an emergency.

John:  That’s one of the accidents that I worked in. It was pretty, widely public was in Kansas City, JJ’s Restaurant explosion, which was about eight, nine years ago. I think it’s all been resolved.

The report, there was a horizontal driller drilled through a marked gas line in a street, in a commercial area in Kansas City. The fire department got the first call. They called the utility. Utility dispatched someone to investigate. When that person arrived on site, there were all kinds of competing needs for his time.

The horizontal boring company wanted to pull their tool out of the hole and go home because it was 5:00 at night. Of course, that would have opened another pathway for the gas to migrate underground.

There were cars driving up and down the street next to this hole with the gas blowing out of it. The restaurants or buildings nearby that it could potentially migrate into. When he arrived on site, he had a lot of competing decisions to make.

He decided to block the street with his truck so that no more cars would drive by. He called for backup. He knew this was more than he could handle on his own. The utility had already sent a construction crew out because they knew the line was hit. They were going to have to excavate and pinch it off or somehow close it.

Then he had the decision go find the nearest valves and close. In this case, it turned out one was paved over, and another had a car parked on top of it, so they decided not to do that. The person probably should have gone into the nearby buildings with a gas detector, but he was afraid if he did that, the construction crew would leave and people might wander too close to where the gas was blowing.

It’s really tough when no matter what kind of training you get and how detailed a procedure you have to…The training is probably most important so that the person can use his own judgment to determine what’s the number one risk and what should I do once I’m on-site.

Russel:  That’s perfect, John. That’s really what I was driving at is while the procedures, and the training, and all that are important, the real thing that we’re trying to do is to equip people with the decision-making skills so that they can get off the script when they need to get off the script.

John:  It’s impossible to write a procedure, a step by step cookbook, for every possible incident.

Russel:  You wouldn’t want to try, right?

John:  Right.

Russel:  That creates other problems. You just wouldn’t even want to try. It might be helpful, you’ve talked about the Kansas City case, it might be helpful to go through that again but a little bit slower and a little bit more methodically about what occurred.

As you were talking there, I’m trying to put myself into the boots of the gas company employee that was the first person on the scene and just trying to…It’s a little helpful if you can actually relate to it on an emotional level as to what that experience is like. Maybe you could walk us through the timeline of that incident from the original call through to the incident itself.

John:  The original call, the utility first found out that there was a problem when the fire department called. Apparently, the excavators that hit the line called the fire department first and actually only and reported it. The fire department dispatched the truck and crew to investigate and then called the gas utility.

The utility, like most, has a script that they’re following when they get a call like that to make sure they ask the right questions and document the answers. Basically, by the second question, which is, “Was anyone injured? Is there a fire?” The fire department said, “We don’t know. We haven’t arrived there yet.” All they know is you’ve got a gas leak at the corner of First and Main.

Utility had to make a decision based on limited information. They made the decision to dispatch a person qualified to investigate both inside and outside gas leaks. Also, knowing their line was hit, dispatched a construction crew with a truck and a backhoe to be able to fix the leak once it was brought under control.

Russel:  I want to explore that a little bit. For those people who work in the gas utility world, they probably get this. For those that don’t, they may not. How many leak calls does a gas utility get? What is the quantity of leak calls you think a gas utility would get in a typical day or week?

John:  In a day, it depends on the size of the utility. They might get a couple. A smaller utility might not get any calls for months.

One of the interesting things — I’ve heard this at many different conferences — the majority of the leak calls turn out not to be leaks. It’s some other smell or something else that isn’t gas. They still have to treat it as if it could be until they get there and determine it isn’t.

Russel:  Again, if I’m going to relate that to my experience in the control room, that’s a false alarm, and false alarms create complacency. An alarm becomes routine. It’s not actually an alarm.

That’s just human nature. I’m not saying for a moment that anybody does that with intent, but that’s just human nature. If you keep screaming the sky is falling, eventually I don’t believe that the sky is falling.

John:  In this case, though, if you get a call saying your line has been hit and there’s gas blowing, you pretty much know this is the real thing.

Russel:  That’s true. I just want to put that in context though because when you get a call like that, and you don’t have a lot of information, you have no idea the severity of what you’re walking into.

John:  Exactly. That’s sort of what happened here. Ironically, the fire department got there first, went into the restaurant. Everyone was saying we smell gas. We know there’s a gas leak outside because we see the commotion. What should we do? For some reason, the fire department said, “Just put out these candles so there’s no source of ignition, but it’s okay to stay.” Then they left.

Russel:  Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God.

John:  This area was commercial, so there are surveillance cameras everywhere. You can actually see the fire truck drive off. About 30 seconds later, you see the gas utility guy drive up, going. It’s a one-way street, so the truck went one way, and the utility guy came behind him, turned into the street where the leak was, and then he began the triage as to what do I do first.

Russel:  I don’t know all the details, and I’m sure that…Who knows? Maybe they had another call. Who knows? I don’t know.

John:  Same thing with them getting the training and knowing to do. Their procedure said if you smell gas you evacuate the people.

Russel:  Interesting. What happened next? The guy shows up on scene. He parks his truck to block traffic. What happens next?

John:  He calls for backup because he knows this. He calls to get people to come out and check the nearby buildings for gas. There’s an owner of one of the buildings. The building right behind the restaurant is obviously pestering him about smelling gas and what can he do. He didn’t feel he could leave the site of the leak to go into that building, so he did not.

Post action, we wished he would’ve told him if it’s a strong smell, get out of the building until we can have someone check it. Fortunately, nothing happened in that building. No one was injured, no fire. He concentrated on keeping people back from the blowing gas, keep the construction crew from pulling their tool out, and keeping people from getting too close to the hole while the…

Russel:  And keeping cars from driving through a gas plume.

John:  Exactly, yeah. He blocked a one-way street with his truck at the entrance. A few minutes later, the construction crew showed up, and they started excavating to see if they could clamp off the leak.

That’s one question post-accident. Should they have done that, or should they have gone to find the valves nearby to see if they could isolate it and stop the leak that way? Of course, post-accident, your decision’s going to be questioned.

According to the utility people, no one from the restaurant told them they were smelling gas, so they did not go in until the backup crews showed up about 15 minutes before the restaurant exploded. They went into the restaurant. Their gas detector basically pegged as soon as they got in the door and set off an audible alarm.

The post-accident testimony by the customers in the restaurant said, “No one had to tell us anything. We know there’s a gas leak. We’re smelling gas, and a guy in a gas company uniform comes in with a device that we can hear the alarm as soon as he comes in the door. We left. All the customers left.”

He actually had been called by a doctor’s office across the street who had called the company to say, “I smell gas.” That’s the only call they got reporting a gas odor. No one in the restaurant, no one in the building behind the restaurant, bothered to call the utility.

He went and checked for gas at the dentist office. Didn’t find any. Came back and went into the restaurant again and told him, “You need to get out.” Went and checked a few other places. Then they were going to go check the building behind. They went by the restaurant literally 15 seconds before it exploded.

You can see it on the surveillance camera across the street. Went into the restaurant for a third time to say, “You need to get out.” Turns out the manager of the restaurant when all the customers left decided it would be a good time to have a staff meeting. They were all in there.

You see the two utility people turn the corner and walk 100 feet and then the building exploded. Unfortunately, one person, one staffer for the restaurant was killed and the rest, a lot injured. The other thing that came up, too, was there was a question about what the utility person said to the manager of the restaurant about the importance of getting out.

The manager of the restaurant said he just said, “You might think about closing it,” which obviously is not acceptable. I haven’t seen any company’s procedures yet that really go into, “What exactly do you say? Are there specific words you use to tell people they need to evacuate a building?”

Russel:  There’s a whole bunch of human behavioral science around this about how people hear specific direction, particularly when they have some kind of confirmation bias about what’s going on.

John:  I can’t help but think the fact that the fire department told them it was okay to stay. It didn’t play some role in there. They’re staying when the gas company said, “You need to get out.”

Russel:  Quite likely because what tends to happen in an emergency situation is whatever you get as your first piece of information, you lock to that as the answer, particularly if it comes from an authority like the fire department. Then you need to hear 7 to 10 times contravening information before you will accept it.

That’s called confirmation bias. That’s a big problem in emergency response if you study the human factor science around that. That all makes sense.

What’s really interesting about this timeline that you’re sharing with us, John, is that if you put yourself into that situation, it’s very easy to say, “I did what I needed to do. I followed my procedures. I did everything correctly.” It’s harder to put yourself into a situation where you say, “Yes, but the outcome was bad. What should we have done differently?”

John:  That’s important too for operators to have a post-accident review of, “Are our procedures right? How would this impact our training?” We’ve actually used that Kansas City accident as a case study in some training that we’ve done for APGA and some of the members, just walk through it and stop at various points, and say, “Okay, based on what you’ve heard, what do you do next?”

A lot of places there’s not a single right answer. The people will debate. No, I would do this. No, I would do that. In this case, they’d say, “I would have gone into the restaurant right off the bat and checked.” Of course, that wouldn’t have stopped the manager from holding a staff meeting.

Russel:  The other thing is in your clear mind you think you would do that. In the moment, you might find yourself doing something different.

John:  One of the things that came up too is thinking in a big…When do you call in the police and the fire department to assist. A utility can’t force people to do anything, but the police and the fire department can.

Russel:  Where is that line? It’s not like you go into a situation and you know whether you’re over the line or behind the line. Oftentimes you’re in the gray area between the lines. If you over-respond, you’re going to end up debriefing that, too. It’s a really tricky thing. I do think it’s important for people to hear this and to think through, “What would I do?”

The other thing I would say, and this is…You’ll see this if you ever had a situation personally where you’ve driven up on a bad car accident and people will be standing around looking. Everybody wants to know what to do, but nobody will do anything because they don’t know. They know it’s dangerous, and they know it’s bad.

In the safety training I’ve had, one of the things they’ll tell you is you get very specific with specific people.

For example, if you have the ability to do first aid and you need to do first aid, but you’re going to need an ambulance, you go about doing the first aid and the first person you can make eye contact with, you look at them, and you point at them, and say, “You. Call 911,” versus, “Someone call 911.”

That kind of thing when you’re sitting there talking about it, it’s subtle. But in the situation, that clarity of communication makes a difference. That all sounds good. Again, doing it in the moment, it’s remembering it, being clear of mind, and doing it in the moment’s a different thing.

John:  That’s one of the tough things is no matter how much training and procedures you have, in the moment when the excitement, it’s whether they can still think is important.

Russel:  That’s exactly right. Most of us if we work in this business are going to spend our entire career working in this business and never being anywhere close to an incident. That’s a good thing. It does create some other consequences. However, with that thing, we don’t have the learning as well.

One of the things I try to do in this podcast is capture that kind of stuff so that that learning can be shared and people can get that emotional experience. If you can get the experience emotionally even if you don’t get it personally, that can be almost as powerful.

John:  Looking at other people’s accidents is…This reminds me of something Ron McClain from Kinder Morgan said during some of the Pipeline Safety Management System Working Group meetings. He said, “The cheapest learning you can get is learning from somebody else’s accident. The most expensive you can get is learning from your own accident.”

Looking at NTSB reports, NTSB does a very good job of, at least for the big accidents that they investigate, doing a pretty good timeline of exactly what happened and all the relevant facts. I may disagree with them on some of their recommendations, but the factual part of their reports is very interesting.

Looking at those, looking at what other folks have experienced, and thinking, “How could this happen to me? Are we ready for it,” that preparedness is important.

Russel:  I couldn’t agree with you more. The thing about the NTSB reports is they’re generally just the facts. It looks like the old black and white TV cop show, “Dragnet.” “Just the facts, ma’am. Just the facts.” That is helpful from an analytical perspective, but it’s the emotional context that really causes it to connect and adjust behavior.

For those people that are listeners to the podcast, if you haven’t listened to the 20th anniversary of Bellingham Incident with Larry Shelton — him sharing his personal experience around that — it is a compelling story. It really makes this point of why the emotional connection is so critical to the learning, at least in my view.

John:  Ron was right. Learning from other people’s experiences is the least expensive education you can get.

Russel:  Exactly. I agree with that. I agree with that. Try to find somebody who’s older and has more experience than you do. Experience is that thing you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

John:  It’s interesting, one of the podcasts previously, we talked about the impact of technology. In the last couple years, had some very interesting cases where the utilities installed automatic meter reading. I never knew this before, but some of those systems actually record hourly gas flow readings. They transmit it back or keep it on the device itself.

Even though the utility’s only using it or the intent was we’re going to use this to generate a monthly bill, those can be real interesting if there is an accident. One, to prove that if you see a surge in gas flow through the meter, it basically proves it came from something on the customer side, not the utility side.

It also has opened up a role that the plaintiff’s attorneys are pushing that utility has some kind of duty to monitor those hourly readings and program a computer or something to issue an alarm if there is an unexpectedly high flow. It’s a lot more challenging than it sounds, but that’s something that folks that have automatic meter reading might want to at least think about.

Russel:  I’m familiar with some of the stuff that’s going on in that world, and I think there’s probably lots of opportunity to do things with that data to improve safety.

John:  They’re finding a lot of different uses for it, looking at load predicting. It’s not quite like on electric where it’s more expensive to generate electricity during the day than night, and you can use that hourly data to charge differently at night. Gas is basically the same price day or night. There are a lot of opportunities there.

Russel:  I’m going to try and do something I do after a lot of these episodes. I’m going to try and wrap it up with some key takeaways. Let me articulate those to you, and then you can give me a score as to how I did.

Here’s the key thing to know about incidents. One, procedures matter a lot. Two, training matters. People need to not only understand the procedure but the reason why behind so that when they need to get off script they can, if they’re equipped to do that critical thinking. That goes to training specifically. That’s one aspect of all of this.

The other aspect is you can learn a lot from reading and developing training around incidents that others have experienced. Lastly, if you can connect it emotionally, you connect that training emotionally with how important it is in terms of the potential outcomes, that really anchors it well. What do you think? How’d I do?

John:  I think I agree. One thing to add that it also highlights in the training part the importance of at least considering doing case studies and doing simulations of accidents so that your people who probably haven’t ever seen an accident and maybe never will at least see here’s a scenario and what would we do.

Even consider getting the emergency responders involved to participate so they know what the various, what the utility does and what the fire department and police do.

Russel:  Actually, John, that’s a really interesting point because if I were going to…Being a technical geek and liking to play with all those kind of cool toys, one of the things that might be a really effective use of AR is the training in incidents where you can actually put the people in the incident. I think that could be really powerful.

Listen, this has been great as always. Thanks for coming back. We’ll definitely stay in touch with you and bring you back again in the future. We’re not near done getting all your experience captured on the podcast here.

John:  [laughs] Okay. Be happy to.

Russel:  Thanks, John.

John:  Thank you.

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

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Russel:  If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know either on the contact us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

Transcription by CastingWords