On Monday, March 11, we responded to media regarding a letter from fourteen state elected officials in Pennsylvania. The letter incorrectly claimed that we have withheld safety preparedness information, when in fact, we have provided all training and information that we can while abiding by PHMSA regulations. Here is our response to the letter:

Chester County Department of Emergency Services requested a copy of our emergency response plan. In accordance with PHMSA guidelines, we referred them to PHMSA for this information. Anyone is welcome to request copies of response plans from PHMSA.  In this case, we did work with PHMSA to facilitate the sharing of our Facility Response Plan (FRP) to Bill Turner with Chester County.

It is important to clarify that a Facility Response Plan is a more detailed version of an Emergency Response Plan, which is what it appears Bill Turner is more familiar with.  Our plan includes all of our assets in the area.  As such, PHMSA, is the guardian of the plan and must redact certain information for security reasons before providing it to the public. This is standard practice for PHMSA and not something specific to this request.

Additionally, at the request of the Chester County Department of Emergency Services, we have previously supplied copies of our Standard Operating Procedures for responding to emergency situations. We have also met with over 40 schools that are in the vicinity of ME1 and ME2 to discuss emergency response planning, including those school districts in Chester County.  In addition, we have trained more than 2,342 emergency responders through our Mariner Emergency Responder Outreach (MERO) sessions including more than 260 responders from Chester County.  In Delaware County, we’ve held eight MERO sessions, four of which took place recently in 2018.

We share Chester County’s focus on pipeline safety and will continue to work with their leadership, and the public, to supply important safety information and training.