Oil and gas pipelines could be made safer if pipeline operators had clear guidelines for how quickly they must respond to accidents, but federal regulators don't have the data they need to establish those rules, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, an independent arm of Congress.

The first few minutes and hours after a pipeline accident are considered crucial for effective cleanup and damage prevention. But the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which regulates the nation's 400,000-mile network of large volume transmission pipelines, requires only that operators respond in a "prompt and effective” manner.

The GAO urged the agency to replace this open-ended regulation with performance-based standards — specific, measurable goals that would make it easier to determine when operators have been negligent. To do that, PHMSA would have to set different rules for different types of pipelines depending on their contents, location, operating pressure, pipeline diameter and other factors.

Matthew Cook, a GAO senior analyst and a co-author of the report, said that to create those rules, PHMSA must first determine how fast operators are currently responding to accidents. But the GAO report warned that PHMSA's existing database, where pipeline acci-dent information is filed, is incomplete and often inaccurate.

For instance, PHMSA requires operators to report the time the incident happened, but not when they first became aware of it or when they arrived on scene. And although operators are required to update PHMSA as more facts become available, companies continue to submit inaccurate data.

In 2010, after a massive oil spill in Michigan's Kalamazoo River, pipeline operator Enbridge Inc. initially reported to PHMSA that the accident occurred at 11:41 a.m. on July 26, which is when the company discovered the spill. It was soon determined that the spill actually happened 17 hours earlier, but Enbridge's subsequent reports did not correct that inaccuracy.

The timing discrepancy was highlighted last summer, when PHMSA fined Enbridge $3.7 million for breaking 22 federal rules during the Kalamazoo spill, including $100,000 for reporting the time of accident as "11:41 on July 26, 2010, when it had been clear within hours of discovery that the failure date and time was approximately 17:58 on July 25, 2010.”

Despite that fine, Enbridge did not correct the error in its most recent report to PHMSA, filed less than two months ago.

Enbridge's mistake is a common one. When InsideClimate News analyzed the 255 final incident reports that crude oil pipeline opera-tors filed to PHMSA between January 2010 and February 2012, it found that 145 of the reports said the spill occurred at the same time that the operator discovered the problem. Twenty-two of those incidents involved spills larger than 3,000 gallons.

"The reports don't give (PHMSA) enough good data to make good decisions,” said Carl Weimer, executive director of the Bellingham-based Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit that supports stronger pipeline regulations. "The data now is so squishy, you couldn't set a stan-dard for when you'd want (operators) to respond.”

The trust was founded after a 1999 pipeline rupture and subsequent explosion in Bellingham that killed two children and a teenager.

The Michigan spill is just one example of why fast response times are crucial. In 2010, a natural gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, Calif., killed eight people. It took the pipeline operator 95 minutes to stop the flow of gas. After investigating the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the response time was "excessively long and contributed to the extent and severity of prop-erty damage and increased the life-threatening risks to the residents and emergency responders.”

Investigators also cited slow response times in a 2011 crude oil spill into Montana's Yellowstone River and a natural gas explosion that destroyed several West Virginia homes in December.

The issue of emergency response is of special concern to ranchers and farmers who live along the route of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would deliver tar sands oil from Canada to Steele City, Neb. They fear that it would take TransCanada, the Canadian company that wants to build the line, hours to respond to a spill, because sections of the line run through remote, rural communities that are accessible only by dirt roads.

TransCanada spokesman Shawn Howard said that if Keystone is approved, the company will use automatic shutdown valves to quickly isolate any problems on the line.

"Depending on where a potential issue is located, more rural locations can take more time to reach (i.e., possibly a few hours) but the pipeline section would already be isolated so that no new product can enter the area,” Howard said in an email. "It is always our goal to respond as quickly as possible and to have personnel and equipment moving as safely and quickly as possible.”

Sara Vermillion, assistant director of GAO's physical infrastructure team and a co-author of the report, said she and her colleagues spoke with many pipeline operators while preparing the study and that all of them were open to the idea of federally mandated incident response times.

"None of them had any concerns with a performance-based standard as long as it was reasonable," she said.

InsideClimate News is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. More information is at insideclimatenews.org.

InsideClimate News is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. More information is at insideclimatenews.org.