In this episode of Behind-the-Scene @NTSB we talk with NTSB Office of Railroad, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Investigations’ HazMat Branch about their work to improve transportation safety.
To read some of the investigative reports discussed in this episode, visit our webpage.
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform.
And find more ways to listen here: https://www.blubrry.com/behind_the_scene_ntsb/.
In this episode of Behind-the-Scene @NTSB, we talk with staff from the Office of Marine Safety, the Office of Railroad, Pipeline, and Hazardous Materials Investigations, and the Office of Research and Engineering, about the investigation of the 2021 Anchor Strike of Underwater Pipeline and Eventual Crude Oil Release in San Pedro Bay off the coast of Huntington Beach, CA.
For full details on this investigation, including a recording of the Board Meeting, visit our webpage.
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast platform.
And find more ways to listen here: https://www.blubrry.com/behind_the_scene_ntsb/.
By Dana Schulze, NTSB Managing Director
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is an independent federal agency charged by Congress with investigating every civil aviation accident in the United States and significant events in railroad, transit, highway, marine, pipeline, and commercial space. We determine the probable causes of the accidents and events we investigate and issue safety recommendations aimed at preventing future occurrences.
The agency’s investigative and technical staff are recognized for their forensic safety expertise, and with support from the agency’s professional staff, the NTSB is the premier safety investigation organization in the world. In total, the NTSB has conducted more than 153,000 aviation-related investigations and thousands of highway, transit, marine, rail, pipeline, and commercial space investigations, resulting in more than 15,300 safety recommendations. As a result, the NTSB has had a significant and far-reaching impact improving transportation safety for all, with 80% of our recommendations being addressed.
We’ve been getting the job done, even though our budget and workforce has remained relatively flat for the past 20 years. That’s until the 15th Chair of the NTSB, Jennifer Homendy, was sworn in on Aug. 15, 2021.
From her first day, Chair Homendy immediately began implementing her vision of putting mission first, building our agency’s staffing and infrastructure to equip us to better meet the transportation safety challenges we face, including today’s accidents and significant events and those coming in the very near future from emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles and commercial space.
Growing our Workforce
Her first step: fund the agency to grow our workforce. Chair Homendy understood that the agency could not effectively operate with the same number of people that we had in 1997, given the growing complexities of the transportation systems we investigate. Working with leadership across the agency, the Chair secured needed funding increases in fiscal years (FYs) 2022 and 2023, prioritizing recruitment of a diverse and talented workforce, starting with hiring the agency’s first chief human capital officer and supporting a hiring surge.
Under Homendy’s leadership, our workforce has rebounded from an all-time low of 397 employees in August 2019 to its current 419 dedicated professionals. The NTSB workforce is expected to grow to 435 employees by the end of September.
Chair Homendy routinely swears in new staff as they are welcomed into the agency by our senior leaders. Just this week, the Chair gave the oath of office to a returning NTSB employee joining our Office of Research and Engineering and new members of the Air Traffic Control Team within the Office of Aviation Safety. That division is now fully staffed for the first time in 7 years.
We also have Chair Homendy to thank for successfully asking the Office of Personnel Management to grant us direct-hire authority, which has sped up the hiring process and enabled us to identify and hire the right talent, for the right job, faster.
Getting Up to Speed Quickly
With so many new hires, agency leaders are focused on ensuring all staff have the skills to succeed. Staff now have access to a Career Development Roadmap with a curated list of educational resources in emerging technology, leadership, project management, data analytics, and many other areas critical to our mission success. We’ve developed and launched a multimodal drone program, including new drones and training for drone operators.
We even launched a new mentoring program in 2023 to connect our seasoned veterans with our newest members to help transfer their knowledge, skills, and expertise. We kicked the program off with a speed mentoring event featuring female leaders across the agency during Women’s History Month.
We’re also investing in our infrastructure, prioritizing funding to acquire long-overdue enhanced IT tools and digital capabilities to improve the customer experience of both staff and those seeking information from the NTSB. This will be supported by the $16.2 million Technology Modernization Fund loan recently awarded to our agency, thanks to an agencywide team led by the Office of Chief Information Officer (CIO) in coordination with the Office of Managing Director, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, and the Office of Human Capital Management and Training.
If you’ve met Jennifer Homendy, you know she’s a people person. She’s always out there building relationships in big and small ways, internally and with external stakeholders. Our recent ice cream social, co-hosted by the agency’s staff-led Diversity and Inclusion Council (“the DIAC”) and my office, is one example of the Chair’s efforts. The social was a great opportunity to break down our organizational silos, help our new staff feel welcome, and assure everyone that we’re all focused on the same core mission, no matter what your role, as part of Team NTSB.
Driving Change with Data
Ensuring our agency leaders have the data they need to make critical decisions, improve our operations, and swiftly answer data calls from Congress and the public has been a top priority for Chair Homendy.
As a result, the NTSB now has a formal Data Program and Data Strategy Plan. We’ve also hired a chief data officer, who will join our agency in early FY 2024. Already, with the help of our chief data scientist and CIO, our data infrastructure has grown to allow staff use dashboards and data visualization tools to help analyze the agency’s work, identify trouble spots and bottlenecks, and make changes to improve efficiency.
The proof of success from our data-driven change and larger workforce is in the numbers. Over the past 2 years, thanks to staff’s incredible work, we’ve reduced our backlog of 442 incomplete investigations over 2 years old to almost zero, and the average time to complete an investigation has decreased across every mode of transportation we investigate. Now, that’s measurable progress!
Rightsizing our Budget
Growth and operational improvements come at a cost—a fact not lost on Chair Homendy. For the past 2 years, the Chair has been on Capitol Hill knocking on doors and speaking to everyone who will listen about why our agency’s budget needs to be rightsized.
She has also spent the past 2 years proving to Congress that this agency is responsive and nimble, and that we’re improving our operational efficiency. All her efforts to grow our staff, reduce our investigation backlog, and better serve and represent our customers are paying off.
For FY 2024, the House Appropriations Committee approved a $145-million budget for our agency. If granted, it would be the first significant NTSB funding increase since the mid-1990s. The new funding has long been needed to continue to grow the agency’s size and capabilities so we can more effectively accomplish our critical safety mission.
We look forward to entering the new fiscal year energized, better staffed, and prepared to meet new challenges, with a new group of NTSB employees ready to join in our critical mission to make transportation safer for all.
The warmer months are here, which means more time outside for many of us, whether for recreation or to tackle home-improvement projects.
Personally, I’m looking forward to running in the mornings, biking in the evenings, and spending weekends digging around in my vegetable garden — but not before taking an important safety action.
Call 811 Before You Dig
April is National Safe Digging Month, the perfect time to remind you to call 811 a few days before you put a shovel in the ground for any reason. This includes:
Calling 811 will direct you to the appropriate resource in your state, where you can request to have the location of buried utilities marked with paint or flags before breaking ground. Check out call811.com to learn more — some states even have an online portal where you can submit an electronic request.
It doesn’t matter what the project is, how deep you plan to dig, or whether you’ve dug there before. Utility lines and wells can be located just inches below the surface or even change depths over time, which might not be as uncommon as it sounds.
Understanding that things shift under our feet is important, especially when you consider how much is going on beneath the surface: there are 2.8 million miles of regulated pipelines and 17,000 underground natural gas storage wells in the U.S., according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).
Don’t Risk It
The number-one cause of gas distribution pipeline accidents is excavation damage caused by third parties: anyone not employed by the gas company, such as homeowners or contractors.
In fact, more than a third of all PHMSA-reportable gas distribution pipeline accidents in 2019 had “excavation damage” listed as the incident cause (PHMSA 2021). Of these, 88% were attributed to a third-party.
If you don’t call 811 before your next home-improvement project, you could disrupt the internet service to your whole neighborhood. Each year, damage to underground utilities costs the U.S. an estimated $30 billion.
Or you could put your entire community at risk. “Improve Pipeline Leak Detection and Mitigation” is on the NTSB’s Most Wanted List because damaged pipelines can be extremely dangerous.
Unfortunately, this is something I’ve seen up close.
Devastation in San Francisco, California
I was the Board member on scene for the NTSB investigation of a February 6, 2019, pipeline accident in San Francisco, California.
What happened?
In digging to install underground fiber-optic cables, a contractor struck a pipeline, releasing over 1.9 million cubic feet of natural gas. The gas soon ignited.
The fire, which had flames more than two-stories high, reached a fully occupied restaurant with a rental unit above before spreading to the neighboring buildings.
Miraculously, there were no injuries. The accident did, however, cause over $10 million in damage. It also put many lives at risk, including those of the first responders.
How did this happen?
Our investigation determined that the probable cause of the fire was, in laymen’s terms, the contractor’s failure to follow safe digging practices.
While the contractor did call 811 to have utilities marked before beginning work, he used an excavator to mechanically dig too close to the marked utility lines. As a result, the excavator struck the pipeline, which released the gas that later ignited.
The safe thing to do — and the practice required under state law — would have been to use a lower-impact digging technique that close to the pipeline, such as hand digging.
Know What’s Below
While you might not be installing fiber-optic cables in your neighborhood, we can all take a lesson from San Francisco: Call 811 before you dig for any reason — and follow the guidance you’re given. It’s the only way to know what’s below. Never, ever take the risk.
Be careful this spring, wherever your home-improvement projects take you. And if you’re a gardener like me, here’s hoping these April showers pay off with beautiful May flowers…and some home-grown vegetables, too.
By Nicholas Worrell, Chief, NTSB Safety Advocacy Division
In August, 2019, I wrote that Safe Skies for Africa was ending, but that the safety journey would go on in Africa, the world’s second-largest and second-most-populous continent. Earlier this month, it was my pleasure to represent the NTSB in a presentation about best practices in safety advocacy at the Civil Aviation Operational Safety Workshop in Cape Verde.
The occasion was Aviation Safety Week, which gathered together transportation safety leaders from seven African nations, the EU, and the United States to share safety knowledge. Attendees were interested to learn from my presentation that in the United States, the accident investigator—the NTSB—has no power whatsoever to require change.
Enter Advocacy.
It’s been said that information + persuasion = advocacy. The idea is never to misrepresent; rather, it is to present information that makes the case most compellingly. If the case is compelling enough, your advocacy might inspire people to act. Then, they might influence others to act as well, creating a critical force multiplier. I spoke to my audience about advocacy methodology, messaging, and tools, and the absolute need for collaboration, working with and through others. I reminded my audience, though, that advocacy differs with the context and the organization. At the NTSB, for example, it’s the one way we can bring about change and encourage implementation of our recommendations. However, I urged safety leaders in Africa to be mindful that all advocacy is local. What might work in the United States might not necessarily work for all of Africa.
Ultimately, wherever it is done, advocacy done right moves the needle toward saving lives. As transportation safety leaders, I told my audience, we must communicate our work to gain the desired impact and outcomes. We must be proactive and go to our audience, not sit back waiting for them to come to us.
It was an honor addressing these passionate transportation safety leaders from the African region. We should always remember that our transportation safety work crosses air, land, and sea. When we share our lessons learned and best practices, and when others share theirs with us, we may save lives not just nationally, but globally, as well.
NTSB Safety Compass Blog 