For hours at the state Public Utility Commission on Wednesday, members of a new utility safe digging committee judged a litany of near-misses, minor catastrophes and crossed signals.
Sunoco Pipeline in Delaware County was fined $500 because an excavator scraped the coating off one of its new, but still empty, Mariner East natural gas liquids pipelines while digging in May. Sunoco thought the line was nine feet deep, not six.
Pennsylvania American Water in South Fayette, Allegheny County, was fined $750 because an employee spray painted a question mark on the pavement above a work site instead of precisely locating the buried water line. The line was later struck by diggers.
York Excavating Co. in York County was fined $1,300 for breaking a well-marked gas line that had been covered over by fallen dirt. The break caused 50 people to be evacuated.
The inaugural meeting of the damage prevention committee in Harrisburg represented the fruition of a key element of a long-awaited 2017 state law. It strengthened requirements for utilities and pipeline companies to register their buried infrastructure to prevent accidental strikes that can range from disruptive to deadly.
The 13-member committee of excavators, utilities, municipalities and regulators acts as a review board — dissecting what went wrong when lines were hit or weren’t marked, issuing or waiving fines, and calling out companies that fall short of the law or fail to show up to be questioned and critiqued.
The idea is that scrutinizing mistakes will make it less likely they will happen again.
Specifically, the PUC has a goal of cutting in half the 6,000 documented line hits that happen each year in Pennsylvania.
“What we’re going to do going forward with this damage prevention committee is to reduce those hits and build a culture in Pennsylvania that safety matters,” Commissioner John F. Coleman Jr. said.
He said he was “truly giddy with excitement” to usher in the committee’s first meeting seven and a half years after a fatal gas explosion in Allentown made it clear Pennsylvania’s One Call safe digging law needed to be stronger.
The meeting was not a legal hearing. At one point, Paul Metro, the PUC’s gas safety manager, discouraged a lawyer for a telecommunications company from speaking for his client — preferring to hear from company representatives with first-hand knowledge about what went wrong and how to avoid it.
Improvement is expected to come from a mix of reflection, sanctions, education and peer-pressure.
Mr. Metro had stern criticism for companies that made glaring errors.
“Scraping a line is a tremendous safety violation, but if it were hit and failed and if it had been energized, your workers would have been in serious danger,” he said to the excavator who had an unnerving brush with Sunoco’s unmarked Mariner East pipeline. “This was mishandled by Sunoco in so many different ways.”
Sunoco representatives did not attend the meeting.
Other companies were commended for taking responsibility for mistakes and adopting policies to avoid repeating them.
The chastened president of York Excavating, Jeff Walker, said the pipeline strike in May was caused by human error near the end of a workday on a Friday — workers used a machine when they should have used a shovel — and the event led the company to halt work, retrain crews and strip the employees at fault of their safety bonus pay.
“We all know how to do it but every now and then somebody just gets lazy and this is the result of that,” he said.
That reaction went over well. “Can I just personally thank you for owning that and respecting the law?” one of the committee members said. “That’s what it’s meant to be.”
The committee will meet monthly. The next committee meeting will be on Dec. 11.
Laura Legere: llegere@post-gazette.com.
First Published: November 7, 2018, 10:28 p.m.
