Remarks for Cindy Douglass Acting Deputy Administrator
Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration
NAPSR National Meeting Indianapolis, IN
— September 16, 2009 —

Thank you for such a wonderful introduction. I’d also like to thank each of you in the audience for allowing me the opportunity to be here today to speak before your distinguished group.

I am delighted to be here with each of you. Since I arrived yesterday I have been able to meet a lot of you and learn a little about your backgrounds, in addition to more details about some of the great things your state programs are doing. For those of you that I have yet to meet, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce myself.

My career encompasses many years of service in both the public and private sectors dealing with transportation and labor issues. I began my career as Counsel to the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee for transportation safety related legislation. My experience with the Committee led to my first job at the U.S. Department of Transportation, where I served five years as Administrator of an agency a good deal of you may have known well, the Research and Special Programs Administration. From DOT I moved over to the Department of Labor to become Deputy Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health.

After my first round of public service I worked quite a few years in private industry, first at the Institute of Makers of Explosives as their Executive Vice President and later as Executive Director of the Steel Shipping Container Institute. Finally, before arriving at PHMSA in January, I served as the Chief Judge of an appellate board at the U.S. Department of Labor.

As a former Administrator of an agency overseeing both the pipeline and hazardous materials safety programs within the DOT, I am quite familiar with the vital relationships these programs maintain with other federal agencies, states, communities, and even industry to achieve their individual safety missions. This prior experience has helped me to know that the PHMSA-NAPSR partnership is essential to helping us fulfill our commitment to ensuring public safety and environmental protection.

With that said you should also know that Secretary LaHood and Deputy Secretary Porcari are also aware of our reliance on you and your programs and are strong advocates for our continued relationship.

We have learned that the success of our efforts to constantly improve safety is multiplied by sharing responsibility and accomplishments with our stakeholders, both within the federal family and with states and communities.

For years now we’ve seen positive results in our integrity management program including a steady decline in the number of serious incidents, particularly on oil pipelines. Through integrity management we’ve been able to show operators that the ultimate responsibility for safety begins with them.

Through a “systems safety” regulatory framework PHMSA has been working to save lives by minimizing the possibility of an incident. This “systems safety” approach is not only done through partnerships with up front stakeholder input, but by holding top leadership accountable for safety performance of lower level staff, identifying and supporting innovative best practices and technology development, and showing organizational transparency, both internally and externally.

In the past few years, PHMSA has taken a hard look at incidents, their causes and what can be done to prevent them. The leading cause of incidents in which people are hurt or killed is construction-related activities. This occurs most often on the distribution systems that run through the neighborhoods where people live and work. This part of the nation’s pipeline system is almost entirely under the jurisdiction of each of you, the States, our partners in pipeline safety.

Throughout the years, PHMSA has been aggressive in working to meet the needs of NAPSR management. As we move forward our efforts in supporting your programs will be just as strong.

Since my time as Administrator of RSPA, the pipeline safety program has changed substantially, but all for the better.

Over the years Congress recognized that overseeing and ensuring the safety of 2.3 million miles of pipelines is an enormous task, extending the Department the resources it needs to nurture a much stronger pipeline safety program. A good portion of these resources include providing increased funding to support your state pipeline safety programs.

While we are still a bit short of our goal of supporting 80 percent of state programs to offset the increasing cost your efforts, PHMSA fought hard to secure a 50 percent increase in funding for fiscal year 2009 and another sizeable increase for 2010. These efforts are allowing us to fund 70 percent of total state program activities, providing for more investment in state training, decision support, and other resource needs and enhancing our abilities to function as a coordinated state and federal workforce.

Before I end my talk I would like to take a moment to discuss a topic that will have a drastic effect on our overall performance as we move forward together in protecting America’s pipeline systems.

Today, with our state partners, we have an extensive regulatory program to better assess risk, educate the public, and advance technology and its use. But regulation alone will not be enough to fulfill our safety mission, as even the best regulations will not always prevent accidents.

We must implement a trusting environment of safety culture where clearly defined sets of values concerning the importance of safety to our organizations are communicated and demonstrated by top management and shared with lower level personnel.

A good safety culture is said to promote a trusting and open environment for discovering and resolving safety problems and enhances acknowledgement of employee accountability and responsibility, increases good communication between the management and personnel, and continuous learning through coaching and mentoring.

This means that safety culture starts at the top, with leaders who embrace, promote, and communicate safety values at all levels in the organization. This creates an environment in which employees “do the right thing,” even when no one is watching.

Safety culture is not something new to our organizations, but should be something we continue to focus on while we work to improve overall safety and heighten reliability.

The Department of Transportation and PHMSA stand ready and willing to work with you and are proud to be your partners in pipeline safety. We offer our capability to address the public’s need for safe pipeline transportation, as a regulator and an advocate.

Thank you again for having me today.