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Our Year-End Letter to Control Room Personnel: CRM Software, Services, and Solutions

To our customers, colleagues, and friends: As 2022 comes to a close, we look back with gratitude at a year that proved to be worth celebrating. Throughout the year, we were pleased to be able to see so many of you in person at various industry events, committee meetings, and customer site visits. We were …

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Lessons Learned from PHMSA Enforcement Actions

Control Room Solutions for Roles & Responsibilities, Fatigue Mitigation, Change Management & Training At the start of 2022, we published a high-level overview of the 2021 PHMSA Enforcement Actions pertaining to the control room. The article was the first in a series of our deep-dive into PHMSA enforcement actions, their findings, and potential solutions that …

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Are You Ready for the New PHMSA Gas Mega Rule?

January 12, 2017 Yesterday and today, the Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (“PHMSA”) has been conducting a public meeting of the Gas Pipeline Technical Advisory Committee to discuss the recently passed natural gas pipeline “mega” rule. Jones Day Publication published an article in June of 2016 that provides an excellent overview of the rule. Key …

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Combining Regulated & Non-Regulated Pipe in a Control Room

What are the considerations when combining regulated and non-regulated pipe in a pipeline control room? Or possibly more to the point, what about combining non-regulated facilities such as compressor stations into a regulated pipeline control room? If you have DOT regulated pipe then the control room must be in compliance with the control room management …

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DOT Inspector General to Address PHMSA’s Progress in Addressing Congressional Mandates

  The Department of Transportation inspector general will assess the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s progress in addressing mandates from Congress and recommendations from other agencies over the last decade. The review, announced in a memo today and set to begin this month, follows a February request from Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the ranking member on …

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Where Should Alarm Configurations Be Managed: Remote Device or SCADA Host?

There are many challenges with successfully implementing an effective program of pipeline alarm management. Even after you get everyone on the same page with definition and alarm philosophy, you still need to consider where and how to manage alarm configuration. There tends to be two schools of thought. Option 1, manage the alarm in the …

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What is an “Alarm”?

The word Alarm is used in the pipeline business to mean may things. Historically, anything that was annunciated by light, animation, sound or other means has been considered an alarm.  Under the PHMSA Control Room Management rule, pipeline operators are required to put in place formal alarm management programs in order to assure that pipeline …

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