Public is kept in the dark on gas line crisis plans

State, city, and county officials in California said they do not have copies of the San Bruno pipeline disaster plan, either.

PG&E declined to provide a copy of its emergency plan to the Associated Press, saying it contained confidential customer and employee information.

The National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation into the pipeline blast last month includes examining Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s emergency response plan and whether it was followed, a NTSB spokesman, Peter Knudson, said.

The federal pipeline safety agency, however, is not required to keep a copy of the plans, said an agency spokeswoman, Julia P. Valentine.

“Congress requires PHMSA to inspect the emergency response plans,’’ Valentine said. “There is no regulation requiring operators to submit these plans to PHMSA and for the agency to retain them.’’

Rather than obtaining copies of the plans, inspectors view them while visiting natural gas operators’ facilities and leave them there.

The Associated Press discovered that federal regulators did not have natural gas pipelines’ emergency plans when it filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for copies of every emergency plan for every natural gas and oil transmission pipeline in the nation.

The federal pipeline safety administration has long been criticized for a cozy relationship with the companies it is supposed to regulate.

Its on-site-only review of natural gas pipeline emergency plans puts it at odds with other federal agencies such as the Interior Department, which publicly disclosed copies of BP’s plan for the Gulf of Mexico and the Deepwater Horizon rig after the gulf oil spill in April. Those plans, approved by the government last year before BP drilled its doomed well, contained errors and showed that BP was unprepared to handle quickly a spill of the gulf disaster’s magnitude.

The pipeline agency’s policy for natural gas pipelines is also at odds with its handling of spill plans prepared by oil pipeline operators. Federal law requires the agency to periodically obtain and keep copies of those plans. The agency’s administrator, Cynthia Quarterman, told Congress last month that her agency would make the oil spill response plans public.

The emergency plan for PG&E in California is expected to draw scrutiny as investigators examine the utility’s response time in the San Bruno explosion, including how long it took to stop the flow of natural gas.