Markey, Warren: Columbia ‘utterly unprepared’
Columbia Gas was “woefully unprepared” for a major incident like the dozens of gas fires and explosions in the Merrimack Valley last month, according to a review by U.S. Sens. Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren.
“It appears that Columbia Gas was woefully unprepared for a major, systemwide disaster like the one that occurred on September 13, 2018,” the senators wrote in a letter to Columbia Gas President Stephen Bryant and NiSource President and CEO Joseph Hamrock. “The company underestimated the possibility of an extremely serious incident, did not adequately build redundancies into its operations or put in place key safety measures to prevent it, and was utterly unprepared to respond to it.”
The senators have sent a series of letters to Columbia and its parent company, NiSource, asking for information about the incident, the company’s response and its policies around safety and reliability. In the letter, the senators said Columbia implemented new internal policies for the kind of work that apparently caused the rampant gas leaks.
“The omission of these sorts of safety measures from Columbia Gas’ operating procedures prior to this disaster is alarming and unacceptable,” the letter said. “It raises serious questions as to why these policies were not previously in place for Columbia Gas’ systems and whether that failure was the result of negligence, cost considerations, or incompetence.”
According to the letter, Columbia’s emergency response plan included guidelines for several levels of severity, but the most significant incident that was accounted for was one that resulted in 1,000 or more customer outages and lasted 72 hours or longer, both of which were dwarfed by the Merrimack Valley incident.
In a statement, Columbia Gas spokesman Ken Stammen said the company has been cooperative but declined to address the specific points in the letter.
“We have been responding to the Senators’ requests for information in a timely manner, and are reviewing this most recent letter,” Stammen said. “As a party to the NTSB investigation, we can’t comment on the cause of the incident or matters related to the investigation.”