New safety legislation announced on 5-year-anniversary of Merrimack Valley gas explosions

ANDOVER, Mass — Five years after overpressurized gas traveled through underground lines fueling fires and explosions across the Merrimack Valley new legislation aims to prevent that from ever happening again.

“We proposed new regulations to affect nearly 2.3 million miles of pipelines across the country,” said Tristan Brown, the Deputy Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration part of the Department of Transportation.

The explosions destroyed five homes, damaged more than a hundred properties, injured firefighters and civilians, forced fifty thousand people to evacuate their homes and caused the tragic death of Leonel Rondon.

The legislation will be named after Rondon and was co-sponsored by Senator Ed Markey.

“The family of Leonel Rondon is still grieving. We must continue making progress by delivering stronger protections and allowing our federal regulators to make swift, effective safety standards. Federal regulators should have all the tools they need to hold bad actors accountable.”

—  -Senator Ed Markey

In fact, routine repairs led to the explosions.

“It was really an everyday routine maintenance effort that turned into a tragedy and we’ve got a host of ways to try to avoid that in the future,” said Brown.

Some changes the Pipeline Act will make include:

• Closing a loophole in the law that restricts PHMSA from applying updated regulations to pipelines that are already installed
• Prohibit the release of gas or hazardous liquids from any pipeline.

Eversource took over the pipelines from Columbia Gas in 2020 making several upgrades including:

• Designed and launched multi-year aging infrastructure replacement program
• Deployed new technology onto the system including new over-pressure protections and second over-pressure protection devices

That work’s been ongoing and will only be strengthened by the Pipeline Act.

“We hope in the next year or so to have it finalized,” said Brown.

There will be a public input period as well and once in place the goal is to prevent another tragedy here or anywhere in the country.

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