This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features Byron Coy discussing PHMSA inspections, why inspections occur and ways to be properly prepared for them.

In this episode, you will learn about the four types of PHMSA inspections and their purposes, how the inspectors generate their questions, and understanding why the inspections are happening.

PHMSA Inspection Planning Show Notes, Links and Insider Terms

• Byron Coy is a highly accomplished pipeline safety professional with over 30 years of experience in the industry. He has dedicated his career to managing and mitigating pipeline safety risks, specializing in the application of pipeline safety regulations. Byron is currently working as a member of the regulatory advisory team at EnerSys Corporation. Connect with Byron on LinkedIn.
  • EnerSys Corporation, an EnerACT company, provides pipeline control room software tools and related subject matter expertise to the oil and gas pipeline industry. EnerSys is focused on control room operations, including SCADA, scheduling, control room management, leak detection, and interaction with field operations.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is responsible for providing pipeline safety oversight through regulatory rulemaking, NTSB recommendations, and other important functions to protect people and the environment through the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
• Operational Qualification (OQ) involves testing the equipment to confirm that it operates as intended, within operating ranges approved by the manufacturer. This process must be performed after installation, significant maintenance or modifications, or as part of scheduled quality assurance testing.
• OQ (The Operator Qualification 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.
• Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state (liquefied), at about -260° Fahrenheit, for shipping and storage. The volume of natural gas in its liquid state is about 600 times smaller than its volume in its gaseous state in a natural gas pipeline.
• Integrity Management (IM) (Pipeline Integrity Management) is a systematic approach to operate and manage pipelines in a safe manner that complies with PHMSA regulations.
• HCA (High-Consequence Areas) are defined by PHMSA as a potential impact zone that contains 20 or more structures intended for human occupancy or an identified site. PHMSA identifies how pipeline operators must identify, prioritize, assess, evaluate, repair, and validate the integrity of gas transmission pipelines that could, in the event of a leak or failure, affect HCAs.

PHMSA Inspection Planning Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 319, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System, compliance and operation software for the Pipeline Control Center to address control room management, SCADA, and audit readiness. Find out more about POEMS at EnerEysSorp.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 give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Kylan Klauzer with ONEOK. Congratulations, Kylan. Your YETI’s on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, Byron Coy returns. We’re going to talk about how PHMSA approaches the inspection process. Byron, welcome back to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Byron Coy: I’m glad to be here.

Russel: As a retired PHMSA person, we’ve asked you to come on and talk about and educate us on how PHMSA goes about determining its approach to inspection. Maybe the first question I’ll ask is, what is the purpose of a PHMSA inspection?

Byron: As you can imagine, the inspection doesn’t make people comply. Inspections hopefully just validate that people are already doing the right thing and following the code. You’d say it might just make sure everybody stays honest. You might remember President Reagan used the expression, “We trust, but verify”

Russel: Yeah. that’s well stated. I think fundamentally, the purpose of the inspection is to assure operational safety. That’s the way I view it. Then there is the, what is the mindset of the inspector? Is, “Well, I believe you’re doing what you should be doing. I’m here to verify.”

Byron: That’s usually the case. There are hundreds of inspections being done every year, thousands of questions, maybe tens of thousands of questions being asked, and records looked at. For the most part, there’s nothing wrong to be written down because most everything is in tidy order.

Russel: How does PHMSA go about determining what they’re going to inspect, and who they’re going to inspect, and the frequency of inspection? How does PHMSA go about doing all that?

Byron: We just have a little time here. We’re not going to be here for a week, right?

Russel: No.

Byron: I need to set a little bit of a foundation for the questions you ask there. First of all, there are generally four different types of inspections that the PHMSA conducts. There’s a general,  program, construction, and investigation.

The general inspections are sometimes characterized as integrated inspections. They cover a broad assortment of all the requirements, mostly focusing on procedures and records. If there are problematic areas identified in the integrated inspection, that might trigger a more focused inspection in a problematic area to happen in some future date.

Program inspections are specific topical areas like drug and alcohol, OQ, LNG, integrity management, things like that. These inspections check on specific program materials for procedures and records and a small portion of time on task observation. They’re very focused on a certain topical area of the regulation.

The third type is construction. In construction inspections, once the procedures are reviewed, the bulk of the work is observation based because, during construction, there’s a lot that can be seen and observed. The trench is open, so there’s a lot of things that can be verified while that’s happening.

Once the pipe is put to bed, as it were, anything that didn’t go so well is going to be hard to be determined until, unfortunately, maybe years later whenever issues with coating, or line up, or the welder’s credentials might not have been up to snuff during the construction job.

Russel: What I would say with regards to that is that some of the recent accident investigations have pointed to the fact that good practice, good records during construction, in terms of managing the safety over the full lifecycle of the pipes, extremely important.

Byron: You bet. Many, many people believe that a well constructed pipe is going to have a better safety and performance record over the long term, just as you stated.

The fourth type of inspection would be an investigation. Nobody wants to go through one of those because that usually means that something bad has happened.

Investigations are almost exclusively done after an incident or an accident, but there may be special circumstances occurring that an investigation is started even without a seed incident or accident. Those investigations are used to determine or validate the root cause.

They can also check the thoroughness and the accuracy of the operators reporting. Operators report incidents and accidents, so a part of the investigation would see that the reporting is accurate and timely. The inspector is also going to be checking for regulatory compliance associated with the nature of the event.

Those four types of inspection manifest into hundreds of inspections every year across PHMSA’s territory. Russel, I trust you’re well aware of PHMSA’s inspection assistant application?

Russel: Actually, no.

Byron: Years ago, PHMSA’s inspections were performed on paper and eventually made it to Microsoft Word. Then, the inspector would print out the Word form and pencil in the answers to the questions that were asked during the inspections. It might have been a 30 page document, six or seven questions on a page.

The inspection assistant was conceived over 15 years ago. It now contains about 3,000 inspection questions, a scary thought.

Russel: To say the least.

Byron: All those questions are tagged with a particular aspect or subcategory in the code, and they’re all available for inspections There are also modules or bundles of questions based on certain topical areas.

When an inspector gets an assignment to do some type of inspection, the inspector works with his or her supervisor to build an inspection question set,  drawn from the library of questions in IA.

Then, as the inspection is conducted, the information that the inspector has gathered is typed into IA, so it becomes a digital record of the event. Paper forms aren’t necessary anymore.

Russel: I’m aware of the inspection protocols that you can download from the PHMSA website. Is the inspection assistant application  an interactive app that’s available to operators, or is more an internal PHMSA tool?

Byron: It’s an internal tool. The inspection assistant states the question, references the code, and it gives advice to the inspector about what an suitable answer might be. Things like, “If the operator has done this properly, they should have one of these, three of these, they should have done this monthly.” It helps the inspector make a judgment about what he or she learns from the operator.

When an inspector is preparing to do the inspection – we’ll talk about that here in a few minutes  – they can get a printout file out of IA for the questions that are going to be asked during the upcoming inspection. It lacks a lot of the extra features, capabilities that the inspectors use during the inspection. They’re not extracted.

Then a few weeks before the inspection, the inspector sends the native questions to the operator, saying, “Hey, I’m going to be there next week or a couple of…three weeks from now. These are the questions that I’m probably going to ask.”

It may end up being a little more/a little less based on various circumstances, but the operator would get advance notice of what’s going to be asked. Based on getting prior notice of an upcoming inspection,  the operator should have a general idea what the inspection is for, what’s the topical area of interest?

All the inspection questions are available on the public domain. You can’t ask PHMSA for, “What questions are you going to ask at my inspection?” because they’re going to point you to the public domain and say, “Here’s the 3,000 questions that we might ask.”

Russel: Certainly, one of the things that we do with our customers is we help them be intelligent about what questions are likely to be asked based on the kind of inspection they’re expecting. You can discern that. It’s some work to get there, but you can discern that.

Byron: You bet. After a little while, if you’re in the business, you can get an idea of what’s asked or what might be asked the next time. The questions are occasionally modified, based on feedback from the inspectors, or maybe a few questions added to make the topic more clear. If a new section of code comes into play, then those 10, 20, or 50, or 100 questions will be added to the library.

Knowing that those are the kinds of inspections that are going to be conducted and with the aid of the IA application, we might talk about the inspection planning. PHMSA develops a nationalized inspection plan during the fall of each year in order to have a plan put together to hit the ground the following January. That plan is dynamic. It’s not the same plan every year.

If there are new regulations that were recently published and have effective dates, there might be a special effort put into asking about those new regulations. Might look at the inspection results from the previous year through the IA tool of gathering all the inspection results. What are operators having the most trouble complying with?

Look at incidents and accidents in recent years or trends, see what are problematic areas. By example, if there’s a lot of corrosion failures the year before, they might ask that special attention be put on corrosion in the next year.

There are regulations that are already in place. Not necessarily new, but they may have regulatory deadlines that had a three or five, or maybe a seven year requirement Maybe some of those dates are coming in, so they’ll consider regulatory deadlines.

Then there might be special initiatives. You might recall PHMSA started a new control room initiative in 2020.

Russel: Yeah.

Byron: Inspect all the control rooms in their territory.

Russel: I might ask this question because I say this a lot and I’ve never confirmed it with anybody working for PHMSA. It seems to me that when a new rule comes out, that there’s a maturity in the inspection process that occurs where, when it first comes out, the first inspections are programmatic. Does your program say the right things?

Then, over time, it moves from programmatic, to process, to records. As time goes on and as PHMSA builds more capability to do the inspections as the operators develop more maturity in our programs, PHMSA takes a deeper and deeper look. Would you say that’s true?

Byron: Yes, I would. By example, when the integrity rules came into play, the programs had to be in place by a certain date, and then the programs had to be implemented by some subsequent date. The first visit from inspectors was, “Have you built the program? Is it ready to go?” That’s your programmatic look.

Then that you’ve deployed your program, you’re actually running smart tools and doing assessment work that had to happen 18 months or a couple of years later. For large initiatives, like integrity management, it’s stepped out like that and the inspection process follows a similar pattern as you suggested.

Russel: That makes sense, right? It takes time for a program to mature.

Byron: You bet. It also takes time for the inspectors to learn the process and to figure out what they should be asking about.

Russel: That all makes sense. I’m going to just summarize what you’re saying so far as, there’s the four general kinds of inspections, and then there’s a whole planning process around new rules and things that may be occurring in the industry that are leading to negative outcomes and so forth that factors in. From there, it moves to, where do we think we can most effectively have safety impact?

Byron: The inspection planning process ends up with the percentage allocation of resources. There’s limited resources for the PHMSA staff, as well as limited resources that an operator has to use.

Traditionally, I recall, in the midst of my time as a director in PHMSA, we would have 10 or 15 percent of resources applied to construction inspections. We had to share time with lots of other requirements as well, but you can’t not apply time to construction. Now, in a given year, maybe that number was a little higher/a little lower.

Russel: I would think that would depend on how much construction is occurring, right? Because the thing about a construction inspection is you can only do it when they’re constructing.

Byron: Right. In those  years, construction inspections  would have been pared back a little bit, taking advantage of the pullback by putting more time into other categories.

That allocation assigns work to topical areas and types of inspections, but it does not identify how to apply, or who to inspect, or where to inspect to implement this percentage allocation

PHMSA has a fairly sophisticated risk modeling process, not unsimilar to risk modeling processes that operators use for integrity management. There must be over 50 categories that come into consideration here.

Some of the more highlighted items include type of commodity. If you’ve got sour crude in one line and you’ve got diesel fuel in another one, which one of the two has a higher commodity risk for material on the ground and eating the pipe from the inside out? What’s the vintage of the pipe? What kind of weld seam is it? Incident/accident trends. Compliance actions.

The risk model helps to identify who should be inspected. PSMA staff develop operator profiles. They also create unit profiles. All the pipe around the country is divided into bite size pieces of maybe 50 to 300 miles of pipe and maybe a station or two of some similar attributes.

Depending on what the regional directors want to see, they can ask for different data views so they know what percentage of their inspection resources would be in each topical areas. Who am I going to go visit? Who am I not? They’ll let the risk modeling process show them who they should be visiting this year.

Russel: I’m sorry to interrupt you again. I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying.

Basically, PHMSA has risk models that include all of the assets and breaks them into small bits, relatively, and captures attributes about those different assets, HCAs, product type, steel type, age of pipeline, those kinds of things that all can be used to feed the risk model to determine what should we be targeting for inspection.

Byron: That chunk of pipe, that maybe 300 mile chunk of pipe, with all those physical attributes also carries baggage attributes. Who’s the operator of that chunk of pipe?

Whatever compliance actions and inspection history that that operator has gathered, maybe not necessarily on this piece of pipe, but on other pipe that they operate, all of that operator baggage gets attached to that piece of pipe because it will be influenced by how the operator chooses to run it.

Russel: From a public perspective, if we’re trying to protect the public, then the risk of operating a pipe changes depending on who the operator of that pipe is.

Byron: For sure.

Russel: It goes to their people, their budgets, there are processes, there’s procedures, all that kind of stuff.

Byron: With the risk algorithm output and the priorities that headquarters has mandated to occur in a given year, each of the regions generates the inspection plan that they’re to accomplish to meet those objectives. They assign staff accordingly to have that work accomplished.

Joe inspector based in Kansas City, he might have nine inspections to do individually. She might be on two team inspections with somebody in Western region for something else. He or she might have a newly hired inspector to tag along on this inspection just for some training purposes.

Early in the year, each inspector traditionally gets their entire annual assignment of work to be done. They are supposed to use the risk prioritization to focus their attention to the higher risk assets they’re to inspect early in the year because they are higher risk. That doesn’t always work out for scheduling purposes, etc., but they’re supposed to lean that way.

Russel: That way, if they can’t get to the entirety of what they were supposed to try and get to for the year, what’s left is the lower risk stuff?

Byron: Theoretically.

Russel: Practice may differ.

Byron: I often get asked, “Why am I being inspected? There’s hundreds of thousands of miles of pipe out there. I didn’t have any accidents last year. Why are they coming and bothering me?”

Sometimes it’s easy to answer that question.; and sometimes, it’s a little tougher. “I don’t know about the particular piece of pipe that’s being inspected, but my risk model says I was supposed to come to see you early in the program.” “I think your risk model’s wrong,” or “I don’t think it’s right.”

PHMSA doesn’t necessarily share their risk process. They wouldn’t want an operator who’s at the bottom of the risk list feeling like, “We’re so squeaky clean, we don’t have to worry about getting inspected for 50 years because everything’s perfect.” They’re not going to share that kind of information.

There’s also one factor that is applied in the risk model that makes sure that the risk model passes the laugh test.

Russel: Run that by me again. That does not sound like technical terminology there, Byron. Normally, you’re pretty specific.

Byron: The risk model addresses all those topics I mentioned, but some will say, “You didn’t have an accident. You don’t have aggressive commodities in the pipe. Oh, your pipe is terrific, it has good weld seams,” etc.

Eventually, PHMSA wants to come out and inspect that pipe. If you’re just checking on those characteristics every year, you’d be very low on the list and never get inspected.

Russel: There’s also a risk factor. Another way to frame that is there’s a risk factor associated with how long it’s been since the last time that thing was inspected.

Byron: That effect is the last factor. Says, “You’ve passed all the other risk criteria, but so many years have gone by and we’ve not inspected you.” That in itself, the more years go by that you’re not inspected, starts raising the value of that risk factor. After a number of years, , that weight number comes up and gets large enough to get you on the list.

Russel: Yeah, that makes sense.

Byron: Each inspector has his or her list of assignments for the year. They know the sort order of the ones that are considered to be more important than the others from a risk sort. Most all PHMSA inspections are scheduled. They’re within the right to make unannounced inspections.

Frankly, if a PHMSA inspector is going to do an inspection on an asset and they hop on an airplane and fly three hours somewhere. They get to the construction job, and there’s nobody there, they’re shut down because the pipe shipment was delayed. There’s no pipe to construct. PHMSA just wasted $3,000 or $4,000 getting an inspector for an unannounced inspection and there’s nothing to inspect.

There have been unannounced inspections on occasion, but they’re usually not so unannounced that there’s no one there. There’s some preparation work done to make sure that the inspection will be worthwhile if it was to happen. It is very, very rare.

When the inspector gets those assignments early in the year, they’re probably going to call the operators that are on in the near term, maybe the next three to four or five months. They may not call the people that they might inspect in October, because they’re not sure of what’s going to happen till that far away.

They don’t want to line someone up and then have the schedule be changed. They may only talk to the operators they’re planning to visit in the next three or four months. Then, as the year progresses, they contact those people for later in the year. That’s almost an inspector’s prerogative about how much advance notice that his or her director wants them to provide.

When that notice comes about an inspection, the operator can ask the inspector, “Why have you chosen to inspect me?” More often than not, the inspector will say, “Because you’re on my list.” They’re not privy to the allocation and the risk work process. That’s done by the supervisors and directors at a much higher level.

Russel: I guess that’s an important thing to understand is that the decisions about how the analysis of the risk and the development of the plan for inspection happens at a fairly senior level within PHMSA. Then by the time it gets to the individual inspector, it’s just, “Well, this is in my work backlog.” They don’t even necessarily know.

Byron: Right, no. I mentioned the supervisor and the inspector of work on developing the inspectors questions set for each inspection. They don’t do an inspection question set for the year. They do it based on the nature of the specific inspections that are on the list.

If there are special initiatives that came from upstairs, as it were, might say, “Well, do your traditional inspections, but all inspections conducted this year are going to ask these five questions that relate to damage prevention.” Even though you might not be doing a damage prevention inspection, in general, everybody you inspect is going to be asked these five questions.

PHMSA wants to make sure people are all doing those five things, or PHMSA wants to know what the operators are doing about those five things because they’re thinking about making a reg change.

Russel: I guess there’s also some data collection that happens when you do that as well because you get to look at a very specific issue, but very broadly across the industry.

Byron: Exactly.

Russel: From a safety performance standpoint, there’s some real value to that sort of thing.

Byron: Now you found out that you’re going to have an inspection next month. What fun? Inspections can be tedious and very time consuming for operators. I’ve been in inspections on both sides of the fence over the years.

Maybe you’ve got someone who’s responsible for compliance management, they’re in the inspection. Perhaps you have a records clerk, that’s retrieving and packaging records as you’re being talked about across a period of a week. You have the program manager. Tuesday is the corrosion manager. The integrity engineer tomorrow. A different person on Thursday.

It makes sense that the operator’s budget  for inspections especially for construction projects.. Very heated argument happens  when people talk about whether or not they should budget for compliance fines.

Russel: First off, I think you should not budget for a compliance fine. These are strong words, and this is a personal opinion. What I would say, if you’re budgeting for compliance fines, then your focus is on compliance. Your focus is not on safety. Ultimately, that’s not good.

Byron: I agree. Maybe the money you would have budgeted for compliance fines, should be  rolled it into your program. Maybe there wouldn’t be a compliance fine.

Russel: Yeah, exactly. If I budgeted 50 grand for fines, I’d rather spend that 50 grand on making my program better.

Byron: Preacher to the choir.

Russel: I do get that sometimes I might get fined, but if I try to fix it, it’s going to cost me a million dollars. I understand that reality. Fundamentally, I have a real hard time budgeting for fines.

Byron: Often, that would fly in the face of some sort of a corporate mission statement or the like that you’re striving to operate efficiently and safely, etc. If that’s your mission, why would you need to budget for compliance?

Russel: Yeah, exactly.

Byron: Ultimately, inspections are going to happen. Often longer than you would like and perhaps not a good use of your time depending on your perspective. But if you’re doing a good job, inspectors are only going to be there to validate that you’re doing a good job.

Russel: Yeah, and the quicker you can help the inspector get to that validation, the quicker the inspector can go home. To me, that’d be to take that money you’re budgeting for fines and figure out how to get through the inspection quicker. That’s what might be my recommendation.

Byron: That’s one thought. The other thought I’ve heard many times is, if I assist the inspector to get his questions answered, I just provided the opportunity/more time for additional inspections questions.

Russel: There may be truth to that, but I think the reality is…I’ll say it this way, Byron. I think you’d agree with this. You certainly have way more experience with this than I do.

My experience with these things is, when an inspector shows up and they see that you’re on top of your program, it’s well organized, it’s well documented, the records are available at your fingertips and you can talk to the inspector about what you’re doing with those records to improve your safety performance, then they’re checking questions off. It’s better all around. I’ll say it that way.

Byron:  I agree. If you’re fumbling or you can’t find the record that the inspectors asked for and that happens too frequently across the course of an inspection, it makes the inspector lose faith in your ability to understand and do all the things you should be doing.

Russel: I agree.

Byron: Want to be careful not to get overly frustrated in inspection and appear to be obstinate or disrespectful with the inspector, because the inspector could interpret that as a way to blow smoke or inhibit their ability to get to the root issues at hand. Then it also could make the inspectors think that you don’t intend to do the right thing in their absence.

As is often said, “You smile when the inspector arrives and you’re ecstatic when the inspector leaves.”

Russel: Not heard that before, but I will be using it. One of the things that precipitated me asking you to come on board and have this conversation about how this works for PHMSA is I had a listener reach out and ask some very specific questions.

I don’t want to get into details because I don’t want to give away any confidences. Fundamentally, what they were asking is, “When you think an inspection process is improperly onerous, what’s your recourse?”

Byron: On the chance that an operator feels that way, the first thing that I would do would be asking the inspector, not, “Why are you needlessly here?” but rather asking , “Why are you here? What is your objective?” To try to get a better understanding of why they’re there and maybe answer your own question.

If the inspector isn’t able to satisfy your interest, then obviously, just an informal phone call to the regional director might help..

This should be happening after you find out the inspection is being scheduled. You don’t want to do that Monday afternoon when the inspector shows up. You’ve learned that there’s going to be an inspection three or four weeks from now. You’ve asked all you can ask of the inspector and you still have questions.

You can decide whether or not you want to tell the inspector you’re going to call the director. You might say, “I’m going to call the director,” not because you think the inspector’s doing a bad job. You’re just trying to get additional information.

PHMSA, years ago, the five regions had geographic turf. Central, Southern, Western, Eastern and Southwest Each region has it’s list of states, but that’s been modified over the years in different nationalized inspection plans every year, based on the efficiency and familiarity with operators.

If you’ve had an operator working in three regions, they might assign one region to do all of the inspections for that operator, regardless of where the pipe is. They would have looked at the O&M program that may account for pipe in three different regions, so why would three different regions want to look through the O&M program?

You might have an inspector based in Kansas City doing an inspection in Oregon. The inspector that’s on site has a director that they eventually report to, usually through a supervisor, but it may not be the director of the physical region where you reside or where that pipe is.

If you’re not sure who that is, you can go on PHMSA’s website, find the organization chart. You find the inspector you’ve been communicating with. You can figure out who his boss is. That’s the director you want to call.

If you ask some particular questions, the inspector is not likely to know the answer to all those type of questions. They migjt say, “I’m going to have to check with so and so,” or “Tell me what you want to know. I’ll make some inquiries. I or somebody will call you back.”

Perhaps that would give you answers to your questions, maybe not the ones that you want to hear, but maybe help you understand a little bit more about why they’re coming to inspect you when they did and not someone else at a different time.

Russel: The counsel I would give is, to the extent you can have these conversations with decorum, it’s very important. It’s fine to say, “In my experience, this seems to be excess inspection or whatever. I’d like to understand what PHMSA is trying to accomplish. What goal are you trying to get to?”

It’s also fair to say that this is needlessly burdensome to the operation. There is a trade off between inspections, and how long they go on, and how much they involved, and how that actually impacts operations. Again, I’m saying that. I really mean to frame that as a question for you, Byron, and just see if my thinking is correct.

Byron: Frankly, if  the inspection maybe isn’t warranted to be as frequent or as long as might be planned and if there is a problem, then that inspection time maybe be better applied to someone else, if in fact there was an error in the risk model process.

Russel: It could also be a training issue with the inspector themselves or something of that nature, too. Those kind of things happen as well.

Byron: Could be.

Russel: We’re all human beings and we’re all learning, so those are all possibilities. Generally, we’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to operate this infrastructure. We’re trying to operate this infrastructure without impact. The inspector has that mission, as does the operator.

Byron: If, after having those conversations with, first, the inspector and then with the director, if an operator is or remains adamant that this is just wrong, I guess they could ask for an opportunity to speak with Linda Daugherty, the associate who runs all field operations, or Alan Mayberry, the associate administrator.

There is one more step within the department. It would be a very unique and very sensitive issue to have a conversation with the USDOT’s Office of the Inspector General. That office runs parallel to all the transportation modes in DOT. They’re responsible for the appropriate operation of federal highway, railroad, FAA, pipeline, etc.

They would be very concerned about a truly wasteful expenditure of government funds. If an operator were to think that the forthcoming inspection was wildly off target and inappropriate, it would have to be a very, very strong accusation  to take the path to the OIG.

Russel: That’s certainly an action of last resort. First, you’d want to elevate an issue through the channels at PHMSA. I would say if you were considering something like that because you felt it was that egregious, then you ought to seek counsel from attorney to get advice on taking that kind of…That kind of action would have consequences.

It’s available to you, but I don’t know if it’s advisable to you [laughs] is what I’m trying to say.

Byron: I agree. If part of your concern was that the inspection is tedious and time consuming, I expect a path like this would be much more tedious and time consuming.

Russel: Yes. That’s well stated. Right. That’s what I was trying to say. This is really helpful. It’s always interesting, Byron, when we get together and talk, because having worked in this space for quite some time, you have an understanding of these things. Hearing it from somebody who lived it from the other side for as many years as you did is helpful.

The thing that I would have to, if I felt like this was going on, I’d have to understand why. If the why didn’t make sense, then I might want to elevate. Or, if I couldn’t get a good answer as to why, then I might want to elevate.

Hopefully, and I think in most situations, at least in my experience, you can work with the inspector. They have a job to do, but they understand that what they’re doing has impact.

Byron: Only the greenest of inspectors might not have a deeper understanding of that, but hopefully, they’re tagging along with more experienced inspectors so they can develop an understanding of the impact more thoroughly over time.

Russel: Absolutely. Listen, thank you again for coming on and sharing this with us. I appreciate you taking the time to put this together. As always, really valuable.

Byron: You bet. Thanks again.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Byron. 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.

If you’d like to support the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify, wherever you happen to listen.

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

Transcription by CastingWords