Corbett Signs Pipeline Measure Into Law

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Governor Corbett has signed a bill into law giving Pennsylvania’s Public Utility Commission the power to enforce federal pipeline safety laws. The legislation will add a bit more oversight to gathering lines, which bring natural gas from drilling sites to compressor stations.
Pennsylvania was one of a handful of states where regulators were not empowered to enforce the federal standards.
More from the Tribune-Review:

The law would not apply to lines in the most rural areas, known as Class 1 lines. [House Republican sponsor Matt] Baker predicts federal rules could be strengthened within the next two to three years to require them to be inspected as well.
Baker said the PUC will need to hire 12 to 15 new inspectors, though Kocher said the number figures to be lower at the start. The agency has eight inspectors today. It’s unknown how much that might inflate the agency’s bottom-line costs, but Kocher said assessment fees and federal funding will defray at least some of the added costs.

To learn more about Pennsylvania’s relatively lax pipeline oversight, read our pipeline primer.

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