System-Wide Response to Incidents: Case Study

This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive procedure for the system-wide response to incidents (SWRI). This SWRI process has been used for identifying emerging threats and incorporating the learnings from major incidents into a pipeline integrity management program (IMP). This process also complements the IMP for threat identification and system wide risk assessment, thus giving consideration to all known threats and their interactions. A recent major incident due to thermal expansion on a TransCanada pipeline system was used to demonstrate the process of SWRI and the use of SWRI to identify the contributing factors of thermal expansion. An example was used to illustrate the engineering assessment for thermal expansion driven by the construction of two new compressor stations on an existing pipeline. The process documented in this case study has the potential to augment the integrity management programs and systemic corrective actions for pipeline systems in the energy industry.