Pa. county pioneers pipeline tracking

Pipelines are ominous. For property owners, they're looming nightmares, complete with concerns about leakage and explosions.

For developers, they're a dwelling annoyance. For counties, they're another layer of infrastructure to worry about.

Dubbed a "nexus of pipelines" in Southeastern Pennsylvania, Chester County has the third-highest percentage of pipelines in the commonwealth, due in large part to the increasing number of transmission pipelines between counties atop the Marcellus Formation and their ultimate destinations.

The county also doubles as a testing ground for an information clearinghouse website the Pipeline Information Center a resource that a local advocacy group behind the effort sees as being useful for every county in the commonwealth and eventually the country.

For Chester County residents, Carol Stauffer is an oracle. She's the county's newly-designated contact for all pipeline matters, tasked with straightening out the twisted bowl of spaghetti that is the county's pipeline map. That's included in the "infrastructure" portion of her title director of infrastructure and plan review.

Chester County, Pa.'s Pipeline Information Center

She estimates between 30 percent and 35 percent of her time at work focuses on updating information on the information center site and acting as a liaison between residents, pipeline operators, municipalities and developers.

"I think what we've tried to emphasize is information," she said. "With so many different players, someone would have to look in several different places to get all the information they want. We put it in one place."

The information center compiles all materials related to pipeline projects taking place in the county and some in adjacent counties. Pipeline maps, plans, permits and contact information, links to regulatory agencies all readily available. A multicolored pipeline map delineates the operator of each pipeline. Residents can enter their addresses and see how close they are to a pipeline and access the contact information for that pipeline.

"We're not advocating for or against any pipeline projects, we're just making sure the information is out there," Stauffer said. "We try to increase communication among parties."

It's appropriate for the role in which Chester Country finds itself. Most of the land-use decisions regarding pipelines in Pennsylvania are handled by municipalities, so counties play more of an input role, rather than an approval role according to Lisa Schaefer, director of government relations at the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania. That said, it is an important role.

"You used to just hear about pipeline concerns in the shale producing counties, but now it's coming to the forefront in most of our counties, across the board," Schaefer said. "For counties that haven't dealt with pipelines in decades, it's a new process, and counties are familiarizing themselves with what is involved with pipelines."

An interactive map allows users to access information on each pipeline running through Chester County, Pa.

That involvement can include participation from a county's conservation district or water resources authority. For the county planning commission, for which Stauffer works, it's tracking whether t he work being done is replacing pipeline, which typically falls in an existing right-of-way, or building new pipeline, requiring a new right-of-way. If the pipeline crosses state lines and falls under Federal Energy Regulatory Commission guidelines, then the county does have to review plans.

Stauffer would like to expand the range of the pipeline map to give Chester County's location more context in the scheme of the regional gas market.The county received a $50,000 technical assistance grant through the federal Department of Transportation, which funded website upgrades, improvement mapping and enhanced user-friendliness.

"If residents can't use it easily, the site isn't working properly," Stauffer said.

Because of the heavy lifting that Chester County did, counties across the country can easily adapt the template for information sharing for all issues related to pipelines, Lynda Farrell said.

Farrell is the president of the nonprofit Pipeline Safety Coalition who started out in 2007 as a resident hoping for answers to questions about a pipeline running under her property. The organization helped Chester County prepare its pipeline information center. She'd like to see every county adopt some of the measures that Chester has.

"What we created here is the boilerplate, it should be adaptable by any county," she said. "The grunt work is done. A lot of the basic development work, the framework, is already complete, so it's just a matter of filling in information about a county's individual pipeline map. It would be easiest for adjacent counties to do it, because it's a smooth transition from the (shared) border with the county that already has its map complete. It would be like falling dominoes."

Farrell recommends, at least, that each county designate a contact for pipeline-related questions.

"Someone in the planning commission or planning department would be best, because they deal with the plans in the course of doing their jobs," she said.

In addition to the website development already complete for Chester County's system, the approach already has buy-in from pipeline operators, municipalities, landowners and county government. And there's a benefit for the pipeline operators, too, who will have maneuver through local government to do their work.

"It's definitely a case of 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander,'" she said. "It should save operators time and money, counties and landowners and make living along a pipeline safer."

Her organization has been visiting with planning departments and board of commissioners throughout Pennsylvania 20 so far offering help to counties in applying for similar technical assistance grants to implement Chester's plan.

Schaefer said the group's proposal has been received well by Pennsylvania counties, which heard an information session at CCAP's 2014 annual conference about pipeline information systems. She anticipated more counties away from the Marcellus Shale would likely show interest.

"Rural pipelines don't have the same safety standards, but once they start to get close to dense population areas this will catch people's attention," she said.

Stauffer said the impetus for Chester County's information center development came from the county commissioners, who responded to citizen interest. "They heard concerns and gave us the go-ahead," she said. "That was necessary in getting this off the ground, even with the grant."