PHMSA Says It Will Issue Wetlines Rule Covering Both New, Existing Tank Trailers

This story appears in the Oct. 26 print edition of Transport Topics.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration said it would issue a new regulation early next year that will prohibit the transportation of flammable liquids in unprotected product piping on both existing and newly manufactured cargo tank trucks.

PHMSA said it is reversing its 2006 decision to withdraw a similar wetlines retrofit regulation because Congress is pressuring the agency, following a new analysis of wetlines incident data that revealed higher fatalities and injuries than previously thought.

The National Transportation Safety Board has urged PHMSA to require the retrofits since 1998, and members of the House Transportation Committee in recent months have been highly critical of PHMSA for failing to act.

“There’s been a high interest by the congressional committee that oversees our agency — that wetlines are an issue we should be pushing forward on,” said Joe Delcambre, a PHMSA spokesman.

The agency is currently conducting a cost-benefit analysis and seeking comments from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the tank truck industry. It hopes to publish a notice of a proposed rule by spring of 2010, Delcambre said.

“We had the new deputy secretary [John Porcari] speaking during the last round of congressional testimony, and he did make a forceful statement that [Transportation] Secretary [Ray] LaHood and the administration look at enforcement and safety of the transportation of hazmat as a primary concern of the Department of Transportation,” Delcambre said.

Mary Kerr, a House Transportation Committee spokeswoman, said PHMSA has not yet discussed its intentions with the committee.

“But we do intend to continue to pursue a legislative fix,” Kerr said. “We think it’s a very significant problem, and that’s why we’re going to pursue it legislatively.”

“This is a politically based decision, not a safety decision,” said John Conley, president of the National Tank Truck Carriers. “It’s not a surprise to me, given the current political climate — a climate of fear.”

However, NTTC has estimated the cost of purging equipment on a new trailer would be about $4,000 to $5,000, and possibly more for a retrofit.

One of NTTC’s biggest concerns is the safety of actually installing retrofits. The industry group said that at least 11 deaths have occurred in cargo tank facilities as a result of workers’ performing welding or other services on tanks that contained petroleum vapors.

“Industry’s greatest fear is that bringing some 27,000 flammable cargo tanks into shops for retrofitting with whatever wetlines purging system is developed will ultimately result in many deaths and injuries to shop employees working on tankers than have not been properly cleaned and purged of vapors,” Conley wrote in a recent letter to the committee.

The government’s new data analysis of 6,800 tank truck accidents over the past 10 years, summarized in a letter sent during September to Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.), concluded that 13 fatalities and seven injuries resulted from the 184 accidents in which tank truck wetlines were damaged or ruptured (click here for previous story).

The review concluded that seven of the 13 fatalities were caused not by fire but rather from “blunt force trauma or some other event that would have occurred whether or not the wetline was damaged.”

The data analysis was compiled as a follow-up to a May 14 hearing, during which Cynthia Douglass, acting deputy administrator of PHMSA, said the industry’s laudable safety record was the reason her agency has not yet acted on the NTSB recommendation.

An investigation by the committee and the Department of Transportation inspector general made public in September charged that PHMSA — the lead federal agency responsible for ensuring the safe transport of hazardous materials — has become “cozy” with the industry it regulates and has exhibited a “pervasive pattern of regulatory abuse and neglect.”

PHMSA “almost never” turns down requests from industry for special permits to carry hazmat that federal regulations normally would prohibit, according to recent committee testimony.