Securing America's Future Energy: Protecting Our Infrastructure of Pipelines and Enhancing Safety Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. KNIGHT. Mr. Speaker, on October 23, a gas leak was discovered at one of the 115 wells at the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility located in my district near Porter Ranch, California. I want to thank Congressman Brad Sherman, who lives in Porter Ranch and was a great partner in this terrible tragedy, making sure that people were taken care of and we could move past this and move quickly to getting this taken care of.

This leak persisted for 118 days and was recognized as one of the largest disasters of 2015. During this time, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods suffered. Some temporarily relocated their families. Two schools were permanently relocated, at least for that semester, and many businesses were put on hold.

As the Representative for Porter Ranch, my immediate priority was to protect my constituents who live there and then ensure that this situation was resolved as quickly as possible. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that a crisis like this can never happen in our communities again. Today we take a giant step forward in doing just that.

In February, I introduced the Natural Gas Leak Prevention Act, which would require the Secretary of Transportation to issue adequate safety standards for natural gas storage facilities like Aliso Canyon in Porter Ranch and another very large facility, Honor Rancho in Valencia, which is also in my district.

The SAFE PIPES Act contains the language from the Natural Gas Leak Prevention Act as well as provisions to create an Aliso Canyon task force that would investigate the causes of the leak and recommend further actions to prevent such disasters in the future.

This is the type of swift and effective action that we need in order to prevent our communities and our families from tragedies like the Porter Ranch gas leak.

I want to thank many people who were involved in this situation. A special thanks to Paula Cracium and the entire neighborhood council for providing support to the community in its time of need. I would also like to thank my colleague, Representative Jeff Denham, for his efforts to move this measure forward, including flying down to my district in March to tour the facility with the people involved.

I would like to thank, as well, Senator Deb Fischer and Chairman Bill Shuster for their immense support and the many staff members who worked tirelessly on this legislation.

This terrible tragedy had real impacts on the lives of thousands of people I represent. We cannot undo the damage that was done in Porter Ranch, but we can and must make sure every effort to mitigate the impacts on their day-to-day lives and assist in the recovery process.

It is time to move forward on comprehensive legislation to prevent another incident from happening in our communities ever again. I would like to say that this would never, ever happen again; but without action, without us moving forward, without people working together and Congress working together, this can happen. So this type of legislation is needed, and the people who are affected appreciate this; and the people who have worked on this, I appreciate very much.

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