Salud Ortiz Carbajal: “I am offering an amendment to ensure we are taking the appropriate steps to improve pipeline safety to mitigate some of…”

“I am offering an amendment to ensure we are taking the appropriate steps to improve pipeline safety to mitigate some of the devastating impacts of oil spills throughout our Nation. This is a particularly important issue for my constituents on the central coast where we have seen the damage oil spills wreak on our communities and local economies. During the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, over 100,000 barrels of crude oil spilled into the Santa Barbara Channel. This was the largest oil spill in California's history that significantly harmed Santa Barbara's unique marine ecosystems and wildlife, recreational interests, and commercial fishing. Paired with the 2015 Refugio oil spill, also in Santa Barbara County, where clean-up costs hit $92 million, these incidents show us that we cannot continue to drag our feet. We need to implement pipeline safety and spill mitigation rules that Congress already passed 6 years ago. In 2011, the House worked in a bipartisan way to pass the Pipeline Safety, Regulatory Certainty, and Job Creation Act. This law, which passed the House unanimously, directed the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, to update and strengthen key pipeline safety standards. The law called on PHMSA to issue a rule requiring automatic shutoff valves on new pipelines and to strengthen requirements for the inclusion of leak detection technologies on pipelines. My amendment is straightforward.…”