PHMSA to Renew Two Pipeline Safety ICRs

The Pipeline Safety and Hazardous Material Safety Administration post a 60-day notice in the Federal register (77 FR 51848-51849) of their intent to renew two information collection requests (ICRs) that were approved earlier this year to allow data collections mandated in two recently approved pipeline safety rules on control room management (2137-0624) and integrity management for gas distribution pipelines (2137-0625). The current ICR approvals expire on January 31^st, 2013.

There is a major change in the record keeping burden numbers being reported in the control room management ICR. The current ICR predicts 2,702 annual responses will be required under these reporting requirements and estimates that the data collection and reporting for those responses will take 127,328 hours. This notice reports the same number of responses but greatly increases the burden hours to 1,018,807 hours (77FR 51849), an eight-fold increase in the burden to 377 hours per response. No explanation is given for this increase.

PHMSA is soliciting public comments on the renewal of these two ICRs. Comments can be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal (www.Regulations.gov; Docket # PHMSA-2012-0215). Comments need to be submitted by October 26^th, 2012.