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On September 30, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) published a notice in the Federal Register indefinitely delaying the October 1 effective date of its construction inspection rule. The rule published March on 11 made many rule changes including modifying 49 CFR 192.305 to prohibit individuals who performed any task during the construction of a new main or transmission line from performing post-construction inspection of their own work. The final rule included contradictory statements that it was not PHMSA’s intent to force operators to hire outside contractors to perform these inspections, yet provided no alternative to outside inspection in cases where there were no other operator employees qualified to do the inspections who were not involved in the construction project. On April 10, APGA filed a petition for clarification and reconsideration of the rule.
PHMSA has formed a working group to advise it on how to fix the rule. APGA’s Vice President of Operations represents public natural gas on the working group. It is anticipated that the working group will complete its work and PHMSA will take action in early 2016.

All the other changes made—except the construction inspection rule made in the so-called miscellaneous rule—will take effect on October 1. These include changes to qualification requirements for plastic pipe joiners. Beginning October 1, a person must be re-qualified under an applicable plastic pipe joining procedure once each calendar year at intervals not exceeding 15 months, or after any production joint is found unacceptable by testing under § 192.513. Previously, operators only needed to retest plastic pipe joiners if that person does not make any joints under that procedure or else three joints or three percent of the joints made by that person, whichever is greater, had been found unacceptable.

A copy of the September 30 notice and the March 11 final rule can be found at www.apga.org/issues/operationssafety. For questions on this article, please contact John Erickson of APGA staff by phone at 202-464-0834 or by email at jerickson@apga.org.