The federal pipeline safety agency needs to make sure its workforce can maintain long-term safety oversight as it relies less on states for interstate pipe inspections, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report.
The U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration shares its oversight duties with state regulators, but fewer and fewer states have the authority to oversee their interstate pipeline systems, leaving these regulators to focus only on intrastate infrastructure.
The number of "interstate agents," as states tasked with inspecting interstate lines are called, has fallen from 22 in 1973 to nine in 2018, and in recent years, PHMSA has not granted new interstate agency status, the GAO report noted. A state pipeline safety representative said a lack of funding is a limiting factor on how interested states would be in these agreements.
"PHMSA has not developed a plan that systematically identifies the anticipated interstate pipeline inspection workload or the number of inspection staff needed to meet that workload," the May 29 report said. "In light of the diminishing role that interstate agents currently provide in bolstering PHMSA's inspection workforce, a plan for conducting future interstate pipeline inspections should also account for the reduction in resources and expertise state inspectors can potentially provide."
The U.S. had roughly 340,000 miles of interstate transmission pipelines as of the beginning of 2017, according to the GAO, an independent and nonpartisan agency that works for the U.S. Congress.
Responding to a draft version of the report, PHMSA agreed that more planning is in order. The agency is developing a five-year comparative workforce plan to evaluate its ability to hire and retain employees for critical functions and other key issues related to developing and maintaining personnel, PHMSA said in a May 10 letter to the GAO.
While that plan should inform PHMSA's decisions on interstate pipeline inspectors, the agency said in its letter that it should also develop a workforce plan for those types of inspections specifically. PHMSA said it would provide a detailed response to the GAO's recommendation within 60 days of the report's publication.
"State pipeline inspectors are critical partners in PHMSA's mission to ensure safety on America's 2.7 million-mile pipeline network. PHMSA is currently reviewing this report to determine how to best implement the Government Accountability Office's recommendations to strengthen pipeline safety," PHMSA spokesman Darius Kirkwood said in an emailed statement.

State regulators are already responsible for overseeing the nation's 2.2 million miles of distribution pipelines, and PHMSA provides grants to each state to reimburse up to 80% of the total cost of the regulator's personnel, equipment and activities. Should PHMSA decide to rely more heavily on state regulators for interstate pipeline inspections, the agency should make sure that the states have enough funding to do so, according to Jason Montoya, who chairs the National Association of Pipeline Safety Representatives.
"I think more states would become interstate agents if the funding levels were there. We would obviously need more resources if we were going to increase the mileage [inspected]," Montoya, who is also the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission's pipeline safety bureau chief, said in a June 1 interview.
Montoya noted that state inspectors are often able to use their local knowledge to enhance inspections and safety. PHMSA's regional officials, too, largely said that existing interstate agents have well-trained staff and leverage their local knowledge to enhance interstate pipeline inspections, according to the GAO report. Montoya and the report also said that interstate agents can go above and beyond the interstate inspection requirements that PHMSA lays out.
In addition to formal interstate agent agreements, PHMSA can take advantage of state expertise through temporary interstate agent agreements, which have been used in six states. Temporary agent agreements allow PHMSA to request states to participate in specific interstate pipeline inspections, but the GAO report found that some states take issue with the efficacy of these arrangements.
For states without long-term interstate agent agreements, state inspectors spend their days on intrastate pipe oversight work, giving them limited familiarity with the interstate systems and operators, the GAO report said. PHMSA has said it sees the temporary interstate agent process as a way of getting targeted, short-term assistance, not as a way of replicating the interstate agent agreement on a smaller scale.
"[O]fficials from some state agencies told us that the agreement's limited scope and ad hoc nature can create obstacles to state participation," the GAO report said. "Due to the limited state role and competing priorities, state pipeline safety agencies rarely enter into temporary interstate agreements."
Given states' hesitation at engaging in these arrangements and the decline in other interstate agent agreements, PHMSA should plan carefully to ensure it has "reasonable assurance that it will be able to provide adequate oversight of interstate pipelines going forward," the report recommended.
