Marc and Chelsea's Law

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 5782) to amend title 49, United States Code, to provide for enhanced safety and environmental protection in pipeline transportation, to provide for enhanced reliability in the transportation of the Nation's energy products by pipeline, and for other purposes, as amended.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, 4 years ago Congress passed the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act for 2002. The States and the pipeline community have praised that bill as an overwhelming success.

That is why H.R. 5782, the Pipeline Inspection Protection Enforcement and Safety Act of 2006, keeps us moving in the same positive direction as the 2002 pipeline bill.

I want to thank my ranking member, Democrat Member Mr. Oberstar, for working closely with me to develop this legislation. Also, Mr. DeFazio has worked very closely with us. We could not have accomplished this result without our subcommittee chairman, Tom Petri, and of course I just mentioned Mr. Peter DeFazio.

I want to also thank the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Joe Barton, and my very good friend and colleague, ranking Democrat, John Dingell for their excellent work to bring this bill to this point.

In September the Energy and Commerce Committee also ordered the bill reported with their amendment. We have worked with our friends on the Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the other body, to come up with a bill that they will support also.

The bill we are considering here today has been negotiated with the Senate Commerce Committee, and the other body is expected to pass the bill later this week.

I have been very impressed with the work of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which is often called PHMSA, and their administrator, Admiral Tom Barrett.

Their response to and oversight of pipeline spills on the North Slope in Alaska this past year have received widespread praise.

We were very careful in drafting this bill to avoid disrupting the hard work and remarkable progress that occurred at PHMSA over the past 4 years.

Like all legislation, this bill contains compromises. The policies in this bill are the result of compromise and hard work. However, the compromise that we have reached in this bill will not take away from the impact of this bill.

This is a good bill. It improves pipeline safety and the role of the administration regulating pipelines.

H.R. 5782 extends the pipeline safety program for another 4 years. To the fiscal year of 2010. These programs include operational funds for the Office of Pipeline Safety to carry out its regulatory and enforcement functions, and State pipeline safety grants that cover the cost of State expenses to carry out certified pipeline safety inspect activities.

The bill also funds emergency response grants, public education and one-call damage prevention programs and grants to provide technical assistance to local communities on pipeline safety issues.

The administration, the States, the pipeline safety advocates and the pipeline industry all support this bill.

I strongly support this legislation to protect public safety, and I encourage my colleagues to do the same.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

At this time I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Petri), the chairman of the subcommittee on this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, at this time I would like to yield 2 minutes to my good friend from Texas (Mr. Hall).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Boehlert).

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes).

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his kind words. My closing statement will recognize his contributions to what we have been able to do.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Murphy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remaining time.

Before I close, Mr. Speaker, I just want to take a moment to thank the many friends and colleagues that I have in this body that have made the last 6 years the most successful and enjoyable of my years in Congress, in 34 years.

While I am looking forward to many more years here in Congress, you are not going to get rid of me that soon, and I will continue to lead the charge for those issues near and dear to my heart. I take great pride in the work of the great Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure over the last 6 years.

We faced some extraordinary challenges in the committee. During this period of time was September 11, 2001. With the support, and I am sorry he has left, the support and cooperation of the ranking member, Congressman Jim Oberstar, we worked together, and within 2 weeks of this disaster for the aviation industry we enacted legislation to ensure the continued viability of this key transportation sector. Without the work of this committee, our aviation system would have collapsed.

We also created the Transportation Security Administration and worked to set up the Department of Homeland Security. While I do not support everything that has happened in DHS, I believe that the efforts of our committee have ensured a safer and more secure America.

We enacted the first major port security bill. We have improved pipeline safety, and tonight we will do it again. We enacted a multiple year aviation bill, reauthorized critical Coast Guard programs, restored the effectiveness of FEMA and overcame enormous obstacles to fund the building and maintenance of our highway infrastructure.

I did not accomplish this all alone, and I want to thank my many friends and supporters in Alaska who sent me to work on their behalf.

Again, I want to thank Jim Oberstar, and for those that may not know it, we never had a vote in the committee in an adversarial position. We always worked it out, worked together, and I want to thank all the other 73 Members of the committee for their cooperation and support. We have the best reputation of the committees for bipartisanship, and I am proud of that. I hope we can continue to work that way.

I have a great staff that has worked long and hard to draft legislation and negotiate on behalf of the committee: Mrs. Megginson, Graham Hill, who is up in the audience who actually wrote this gas bill, Jim Tymon who worked on this bill and all the other bills and all the other staff members I have.

I know the many sacrifices that the staff have made to get the job done, and I want them to know that I am grateful for their efforts and very proud of them and for America.

I also want to thank my many friends here in Washington who have taken the time to keep me informed and support our efforts to enact good transportation policy.

I finally want to thank my wife, Lu, TEA-LU, a bill that was named after her, for her close friendship, constant patience, support and encouragement. She is my inspiration for a legacy of the future of this Nation.

I look forward to the next 2 years working with this House in the House of Representatives to achieve great things in the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I may not be the ranking member but I will be on the committee. I will be there, and we can provide for this Nation.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, just about everything that needs to be said about the pipeline safety bill has been said, so I will not repeat the details, the specifics of the legislation. It is a good bill. We have spent a lot of time in subcommittee, in full committee, and in conferring between our Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Energy and Commerce Committee and with the responsible committee in the other body, and we have finally ironed out the details and have a very sound framework for the future.

The Office of Pipeline Safety has had a very checkered history. It has not worked effectively for a very long time, and then it had an awakening and it got on the right track again. We got the number of inspectors increased, funding for the system increased, we straightened out the cooperation, the coordination between the Federal office and the State offices. Then there was a period of decline.

Now this administration, to their great credit, has designated the best person in the history of this program to head up the Office of Pipeline Safety, though it has a longer title now, and that is Admiral Tom Barrett, who brings Coast Guard discipline and a Coast Guard organization structure and a Coast Guard safety mindset into the work of this agency, which is its principal mission, safety.

Admiral Barrett, from the time he walked on to the property, had conversations with me, as I am sure he did with Chairman Young, and instilled great confidence in his ability to lead the agency, implement the law, to give us suggestions on how we can improve the legislative product and give him the tools that the agency needs to carry out its mission effectively. And that has certainly been undertaken, and to his great credit, Admiral Barrett has done a superb job of leadership for the Office of Pipeline Safety.

The first hearing I held as chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee in 1987 was following a pipeline break and an extraordinary explosion that killed two people in Moundsview, just outside my congressional district, when a gasoline pipeline leaked for days; and at 2 o'clock in the morning a car passing through with a loose tailpipe hit the pavement, caused a spark, ignited the whole street, and a mother and her daughter were incinerated in the process. Why? Because the Office of Pipeline Safety and the pipeline operator were not doing their jobs.

That is not going to happen casually at least in the future. There may be some catastrophic failure of some kind, but in place now and with this legislation, and thanks to Admiral Barrett's oversight, there is a system of safety in place in this agency. For that, I thank our subcommittee chairman, Mr. Petri, the ranking member, Mr. DeFazio, our committee staff on both sides, and Chairman Young.

This may be our last opportunity on the House floor during this session of Congress for me to pay tribute to the leadership the gentleman from Alaska has given to our committee over these 6 years.

Forever etched in title 49 of the U.S. Code will be the biggest transportation investment in a single bill in the history of our country, and that will be SAFETEA-LU, $286.5 billion, a work product through which our chairman led us in subcommittee, in full committee, and in a long and difficult conference with the other body.

I will always remember Chairman Young's courage, Mr. Speaker, standing before his President, advocating for a robust investment of $375 billion, as recommended by the Department of Transportation, in the future of highway and transit needs in America, improved pavement condition, reduced congestion and improved safety, and standing before his own Republican Conference and advocating, and staying the course, not wilting along the wayside when we had to scale that figure back to the ultimate $286.5 billion, maintaining intact within that legislation good public policy that will be an enduring legacy for our chairman and for our committee and for our country.

We go now into the implementation of SAFETEA-LU, awaiting the interim report of the commission that our committee authorized on the future of transportation needs in the country and how to finance it. But we will do so with the blueprint in our hand and lying ahead of us, which was crafted by this committee under the chairman's leadership.

That and many other items of significant achievement, including the great investments that our committee has authorized and that are now being carried out in the U.S. Coast Guard, for which I know the chairman has a great affinity and which service is so important to his State of Alaska, but to the thousands of miles of coastline on the salt water coast and the inland waterways on the Great Lakes of our country.

For his leadership, for his skill, for his courage and standing by principle, I salute our chairman, and thank him for his service and for the privilege of

the partnership that we have enjoyed during these 6 years.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support this evening of H.R. 5782, the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act, and urge its approval by the House. This measure is both important and timely. It modernizes the Pipeline Safety Act of 2002, which, while regarded as successful, now should be expanded to address some new urgent needs.

For example, there have been two instances in the recent past of major oil spills from low pressure transmission lines in Alaska. The most recent spill necessitated shutting down for an extended time a substantial portion of the oil flow from Alaska to the lower 48 States. These spills, which were much publicized, highlighted the need for regulation of the low stress transmission lines which are currently exempt from all regulation. The bill before us today subjects low stress transmission lines to Federal regulation and addresses that urgent need.

As another example of needed change, the bill contains incentives for all States to adopt programs to prevent damage to pipelines from excavation work. The damage prevention program that is now in place in my State of Virginia has been a demonstrated success in dramatically reducing the incidents of excavation damage to pipelines.

The bill before us specifies that the nine elements that are found in this very successful Virginia law, which are widely recognized as enabling that success, should be included in State damage prevention programs as a condition for States being certified by the U.S. Department of Transportation to regulate and enforce their States' pipeline standards.

The bill also creates a new grant program for States to implement excavation damage prevention programs which include each of those nine elements.

Another new provision will require the implementation of integrity management plans for natural gas distribution lines, which are currently exempt from regulation. Distribution lines account for more than 85 percent of all natural gas lines in the United States. The bill before us directs that in 2007 the Office of Pipeline Safety publish a rule addressing integrity management for distribution lines.

To its credit, that office has work well under way to create the first management plan for natural gas distribution lines, and I commend the consensus-based approach that the office is taking to achieve its goal, and the fine work that the office has performed so far in pursuit of that effort.

At my urging, the 2002 act included a provision authorizing technical assistance grants for local communities so that they will have the expertise to participate meaningfully in regulatory proceedings that affect transmission lines and other pipelines. I have been disappointed that during the past 4 years no grants have been awarded under that authority. The bill before us directs the Department to publish criteria for the award of grants and to make at least three demonstration community assistance technical grants in the near term.

Finally, the bill authorizes the funding necessary for the Department of Transportation to hire an additional 45 safety inspectors so as to augment the safety advances the bill otherwise makes.

In September, the Energy and Commerce Committee, which shares jurisdiction over pipelines and over this measure, approved this measure by voice vote. That effort was truly bipartisan, and I want to commend Chairman Barton of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Subcommittee Chairman Hall and Ranking Member Dingell of the full committee for the constructive work that produced H.R. 5782.

I also want to commend Chairman Young, Ranking Member Oberstar, Mr. Petri and Mr. DeFazio of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which shares jurisdiction over this measure with the House Energy and Commerce Committee, for their fine work in bringing this measure to the floor today.

The 2002 law has produced positive results with an increased emphasis on safety and accident prevention, both by the agencies of enforcement and by industry. The bill before us usefully builds on that success.

Mr. Speaker, I urge its approval by the House.

Mr. Speaker, 4 years ago this Congress passed the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002. That piece of legislation expired September 30. The bill before us, H.R. 5782, reauthorizes the Federal pipeline safety programs through 2010 and amends existing pipeline safety law to enhance the safety and reliability of transporting the Nation's energy products by pipelines.

By all accounts, the 2002 safety bill was an overwhelming success and, therefore, this bill does not deviate from the directions set forth in that legislation. This bill provides the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration with new civil penalty authority to enforce One-Call laws in States that do not adequately enforce those laws.

This enforcement authority is balanced in the sense that it could be used on an operator who fails to respond to a pipeline location request or fails to accurately mark the location of a pipeline, as well as an excavator who fails to use the One-Call system or disregards location information or markings.

The bill also provides incentives to States to adopt and implement a comprehensive State damage prevention program and provides guidance to States on elements for an effective underground damage program. The bill requires the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to establish a distribution and integrity management program which pipeline operators must implement and requires that the administration develop regulations for the operation of low stress hazardous liquid pipelines. This bill also directs the administration to develop standards to reduce risks in pipeline control rooms associated with human factors, including operator fatigue.

I am happy to say that this bill has received broad support from the administration, the States, the pipeline safety advocates, and others in the pipeline community. It is also important to point out that this bill was developed in conjunction with the House Energy and Commerce Committee. In addition, the Senate Commerce Committee supports this bill and is scheduled to take it up before the end of the week.

Mr. Speaker, I support this important legislation. Before I yield back the balance of my time, and as this may be the final bill from the Subcommittee on Highways, Transit and Pipelines to be considered here on the floor of our House this Congress, I would just like to take a moment to pay tribute to my chairman, Don Young from Alaska, to salute his 6 years of leadership on our committee. I have enjoyed serving as part of his team on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

I would also like to say to my colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle, Mr. Oberstar and Mr. Peter DeFazio, that I believe we have done some good work during this Congress, and I look forward to continuing to work together to accomplish good things for the country in the 110th Congress.

Finally, I would like to say a word of thank you for a job well done to the staff of the subcommittee, who have labored diligently on our subcommittee matters. On the Republican side, Graham Hill, Jim Tymon, Joyce Rose, Suzanne Newhouse, Bailey Edwards and Tim Lindquist. On the Democratic side, Ken House, Art Chan, Stephanie Manning and Jackie Schmitz. Thank you for a job well done.

Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of H.R. 5782 as amended. This is a good bill that reflects considerable work between the Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Pipeline safety is not one of the most high-profile issues that the Congress deals with but it is one of the most important. Because oil and gas pipelines are largely out of the public's sight, they are usually out of mind as well, that is until we have a failure such as, those several years ago in the State of Washington and New Mexico, which left several people dead. The shut-in of Prudhoe Bay in Alaska last August served as a stark reminder of that dire consequences of non-lethal pipeline accidents.

After the Prudhoe Bay incident I announced that pipeline safety reauthorization needed to include three important elements: First, the law needed to be changed to cover low-stress pipelines such as those that failed in Alaska; second, enforcement needed to be strengthened; and third, we needed more transparency in DOT's enforcement processes. I am pleased to report that this bill accomplishes those objectives but also does much more.

The bill addresses excavation damage--one of the leading causes of pipeline incidents--through several measures. It requires States with pipeline safety programs certified by the Department of Transportation (DOT) to establish a damage prevention program. The bill establishes grants to States to carry out such programs, and includes new penalty provisions for those who fail to abide by a State's call-before-you-dig program.

The bill also requires DOT to prescribe minimum integrity management standards for gas distribution operators, including a new requirement that excess flow valves be installed on new service lines. These new provisions will help strengthen that portion of the gas pipeline system that is closest to most American homes.

The bill takes a substantial step in making DOT's pipeline safety enforcement process more transparent to the general public, which has been a longstanding concern of mine. DOT will now be required to publish a monthly summary of its enforcement actions on both liquid and gas pipelines, giving the public valuable insight into areas where problems exist, and giving pipeline operators a forum to demonstrate they have been corrected.

The bill before us includes language passed by the Committee on Energy and Commerce that requires the vast majority of low-stress liquid lines to be regulated in a manner similar to high-stress liquid lines. This language responds to the issues raised by the spill on Alaska's North Slope last spring.

This bill also includes new language to require that pipeline operators file management plans that set forth a maximum limit on the hours of service performed by control room employees. I congratulate my good friend, the gentleman from Minnesota Mr. Oberstar, for his dedication to this issue.

Finally, the bill authorizes DOT to hire an additional 45 new safety inspectors to carry out the important responsibilities that we have assigned to the department in this bill.

I want to thank Chairmen Young and Barton and Ranking Member Oberstar for all of their efforts on this bill and I urge the House to pass H.R. 5782.