Pipelines continue to be the safest method of delivering gas and petroleum products across great distances and over all manner of terrain. The hundreds of thousands of major transmission pipelines throughout the world operating virtually around-the-clock, unseen to the general public, attest to this fact.

However, pipelines as an engineered facility do fail from time to time. The consequences of a catastrophic failure most certainly costs the operator additional money through repair and possibly loss of product throughput. Damage to the surrounding environment, especially in sensitive areas, can be very expensive. Most important, public safety must be maintained.

A safe,...