The pipeline community staffs the organizations to which the Federal Government goes for advice on how to regulate the pipeline companies. Organizations such as API, INGAA and NACE. Even PHMSA - the Pipeline Hazardous Material and Safety Administration, Department of Transportation, the Federal Government body charged with pipeline oversight and regulation - is itself staffed at the engineering level with ex pipeline employees. What is also sad, at higher bureaucratic levels in PHMSA, knowledge of pipelines is minimal at best. Pipeline companies are owned by shareholders. Management is driven to increase share value to attract more shareholders. Spending money on maintenance is revenue maintaining, not revenue increasing and is, therefore, very high on the totem pole of things to be avoided. While stating they follow the Federal Rules applied to pipelines (49CFR Parts 190 through 199), and they do follow said rules, the rules were strongly influenced (written?) by those who must obey them. So while they appear complex and efficient they are designed, for the most part, to NOT find the kind trouble that caused this accident (most likely external corrosion, (not soil erosion for Pete's sake). Why? Because if it was found, they would have to spend big bucks to fix it, along with the tens of thousands of other instances like it. For example, 49CFR Part 192 Sub Part L, addressing the permit procedure for INCREASING the operating stress in a pipeline, specifies the use of inspection techniques that CANNOT find some, or maybe even most, of the information and data the Sub Part requires must be found. It is not that the severe limitations of the techniques are not known. They are well recognized by the pipeline industry. So why are these techniques specified and not others that are far more capable of locating potential problems before they become fireballs, incinerating people, animals and property, and despoiling precious forests and wetlands? For the pipeline owner it is cheaper to pay damages after an (avoidable) incident than to pay maintenance costs to prevent one. Technology does exist which can find problems like this, pipeline owners strenuously resist using it, recommending, instead, 70 year old inspection techniques that by their very nature, cannot find (huge sigh of relief) the type of fault that caused this failure, requiring the concomitant expenditure of what would otherwise be large amounts of profits. Our pipeline infrastructure is getting very old. Most of it has been in the ground for 40 years or more. Mother Nature wants to turn the steel in the pipelines back into iron oxide, and she is doing her best to do just that. As people age, they need fixing more often (a multi-billion dollar annual business). The same goes for pipelines. With around 2.4 million miles of regulated pipe in the ground, with an average estimated maintenance cost (if the pipeline owners were ever forced to spend it) of one dollar per foot per year, pipeline maintenance would be a $12.7 billion dollar a year industry with lots of employment. Seems like more people will have to die (Bellingam, WA 1999 and Carlsbad, NM 2001) before the folks on Capitol Hill wake up to very real potential of catastrophic failure of high pressure gas pipelines that run underneath childrens' play areas and Church parking lots.