Securing America's Future Energy: Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. PALLONE. I thank my friend from Massachusetts.

Mr. Speaker, I want to echo what Mr. Capuano said about the bipartisan nature of this bill and in our working together between the two committees to achieve success.

The vast network of energy pipelines in this country is essentially out of sight, out of mind for most Americans, but when something goes wrong, these facilities can make themselves known in devastating and sometimes deadly ways.

This is something that both Representative Capps and Representative Sherman, unfortunately, have experienced since the start of this Congress. My own district experienced the devastation of a pipeline failure in 1994 when a pipeline exploded in Edison, New Jersey, and destroyed about 300 homes. Ever since then, I have sought to make our Nation's pipelines safer by making the law and its regulator stronger.

The legislation before us, while not the bill that maybe we would have written, as Mr. Capuano said, is a good proposal that moves the ball forward on safety. It is the result of a number of weeks of bipartisan, bicameral negotiations. While some compromises were made, this is a product that in many ways is greater than the sum of its parts. I am particularly pleased that it includes versions of important provisions that were authored by a number of Energy and Power Subcommittee members, including Mrs. Capps, Messrs. Green, Engel, McNerney, and Welch, and Ranking Member Bobby Rush.

In particular, the House amendment gives the Secretary of Transportation, for the first time ever, emergency order authority to address the threats to public health, safety, and the environment that are posed by dangerous pipelines on a comprehensive, industrywide basis. It also changes the existing pipeline safety information grant program, which helps ensure adequate funding of pipeline safety technical assistance grants to communities and nonprofit organizations. I am pleased that the legislation improves the protection of coastal beaches and marine coastal waters--areas that are vital to my district and to the districts of many others--by explicitly designating them as areas that are unusually sensitive to the environmental damage that is caused by pipeline failures. It also contains a provision that establishes a program for regulating underground natural gas storage facilities.

I urge the passage of the bill.

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