Pipeline safety legislation inspired by Lawrence gas disaster is part of federal spending package

By: Martin Finucane

Pipeline safety legislation introduced in response to the 2018 natural gas explosions and fires in the Lawrence area is included in the year-end spending package passed by Congress and awaiting the president’s signature, lawmakers said Tuesday.

The legislation is named after Leonel Rondon, the young man from Lawrence who died in the September 2018 disaster.

“More than two years after the tragic and preventable Merrimack Valley gas explosions impacted thousands of families in Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover, our legislation to prevent another disaster like this is finally on the cusp of becoming law,” said US Representative Lori Trahan in a joint statement with US Representative Seth Moulton and the state’s two US senators, Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren.

The Columbia Gas network in the Merrimack Valley was overloaded with gas pressure on Sept. 13, 2018, triggering a catastrophic failure that caused numerous fires and explosions to rip through the three communities. Rondon, 18, was killed when a house exploded and the chimney collapsed on the car he was sitting in with friends. The disaster injured more than 20 other people, damaged more than 130 buildings, and displaced hundreds of families for weeks.

The company has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in criminal fines and civil settlements. Its parent company, NiSource Inc., sold it to Eversource Energy in October, but NiSource retains responsibility for the liabilities.

The bill’s provisions include: Improving emergency response coordination between the public and first responders; requiring the use of qualified employees, such as professional engineers, to approve gas engineering plans or significant changes to the system; requiring on-site monitoring of system pressure by qualified employees during construction; requiring regulator stations, which are critical to preventing overpressurization, to be set up so there are technological redundancies; and requiring system operators to assemble reliable and complete maps and records of key pressure controls, accessible to anyone working on the system, lawmakers said.

Congress passed a $900 billion pandemic relief package Monday night, and also tacked on a $1.4 trillion catchall spending bill and thousands of pages of other end-of-session business in a massive bundle of bipartisan legislation.

The bill also included the Water Resources Development Act, legislation that Markey and Warren said in a joint statement would benefit Massachusetts in a number of ways.

Warren said that the legislation would “support critically important infrastructure projects across the Commonwealth.”

The bill directs the US Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the replacement of the Bourne and Sagamore bridges; asks the Corps to study climate resiliency in the Boston metro area; and increases the annual funding cap for the Corps’ Storm and Hurricane Restoration and Impact Minimization Program to $38 million, which will “allow coastal communities across Massachusetts to implement more robust shoreline erosion and beach nourishment projects.”

The proposal would also authorize a feasibility study for a comprehensive erosion control project in Newbury and Newburyport; reauthorize the Muddy River Environmental Restoration Project in Boston and Brookline; and direct the Corps to work with North Adams and the Hoosic River Revival Organization to on a flood risk management project along the Hoosic River.

Markey, in a joint statement with Rhode Island US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Rhode Island US Representative Jim Langevin, also hailed the spending bill’s inclusion of a proposal on wind and solar power, including one that would extend the investment tax credit for offshore wind facilities at 30 percent through 2025.

“Offshore wind projects are a crucial part of America’s clean energy future, creating tens of thousands of jobs up and down the East Coast and reducing carbon pollution. In our effort to harness this potential, we will now be able to provide this burgeoning industry the long-term certainty in the tax code that it needs,” Markey said in the statement.