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“PORTER RANCH GAS LEAK” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Transportation was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2435 on May 17, 2016.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
PORTER RANCH GAS LEAK
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman) for 5 minutes.
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to report to this Congress on the Porter Ranch gas leak, the largest methane leak in the history of our country.
It began last October 23, and it lasted for, roughly, 5 months. The amount of natural gas that escaped is measured in billions of cubic feet. Some 8,000 families were evacuated for months. Our family, because we live just about as close as anyone to the leaking well, chose not to evacuate but, rather, to rely on filtration systems and the fact that we spend much of our time in Washington.
So how should Congress respond?
We must say never again--not again in Porter Ranch, not again anywhere in this country--but it could happen again because this natural gas storage facility was the fifth largest in the country. That means there are four other areas that could have an even larger natural gas leak. There are no Federal regulations for the safe storage of natural gas, and State regulations are so minimal that they are incredibly minimal even in famously green California.
Currently, PHMSA, an agency of the Department of Transportation, acknowledges that it has the authority to write Federal regulations. They have decided to do so, and my hope is that they will have them this fall. This arises, in large part, because I had a chance to discuss this with the President of the United States back in January in front of about 80 or 100 of our colleagues, and he made a commitment that his administration would work to make sure this never happens again. Not only is PHMSA working on the regulations, but the OMB has assured me that they will act promptly on approving those regulations once they are finalized.
We in Congress are working on legislation that is designed to prod PHMSA into acting quickly, but it is important that we not pass legislation that actually narrows the existing statutory power or gives sentences in statutory provisions that could be used by the oil and gas industry to invalidate tough regulations.
That is why it is critical, for example, that any statute we pass, as the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's product provides, states explicitly that we are not preempting higher, tougher State regulations and that the action taken in Congress will not make people less safe than their States would have them be.
Two issues confront SoCalGas, which is the utility that is responsible for this leak.
The first is that they are going to try to get consumers to pay for the cost of their negligence, using the phrase that they should pass through to consumers the ``reasonable cost'' of dealing with this disaster; so the consumers around Los Angeles should pay for the cost of providing relocation assistance to 8,000 families, many of whom have been out of their homes for 5 months and longer; the ``reasonable costs'' of plugging the leak should be passed through to consumers. The reasonable costs of repairing unreasonable negligence is never an ordinary and necessary expense to be passed through to consumers.
This leak resulted from SoCalGas' negligence. There was a subsurface safety valve on the well in question that was installed in the 1950s, that was removed by SoCalGas in the 1970s, and was never replaced. This well they used to inject and remove natural gas, not through the piping that was intended or the tubing that was intended for that purpose, but through the casing that was never intended for that purpose; and the pressure, which is the amount of gas crammed into the field, seems to be inconsistent with the age of the wells--some going back 60-years plus--that were being used to inject and withdraw the natural gas. The costs of this event must not be passed through to the consumers of Los Angeles.
Second, realizing they may have to bear the costs themselves, SoCalGas has decided to shortchange the residents who have evacuated. They have decided they don't want to pay for the required cleaning protocol that is necessary to make homes safe. That is in their release of just a couple of days ago. That is outrageous. The cleaning is necessary to make the homes safe. LA County Public Health says so, and SoCalGas should pay that cost, too.
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