The Pipeliners Podcast has been around since 2017, hosted by Russel Treat in the USA. I started listening to it in its early days, and listened for a couple of years, but recently took it off rotation in a podcast cleanup (it’s pretty focussed on US pipelines).
Fortunately, though, I’ve become aware that one of our very own, Jan Hayes, was recently interviewed on the podcast, not for just one episode, but two. So I’ve added it back into rotation.
Jan is interviewed by Russel about organisational factors in pipeline incidents, and about one of our favourite topics, ALARP. Both episodes cover more than that, and provides a good introduction into risk management AS2885-style.
You can hear in Russel’s questions and responses how different it is managing risk in the US vs here in Australia.
The episodes are only about 30mins long – perfect company for your daily walk!
Today, Standards Australia has published the revised AS2885.3-2022, Pipelines – Gas and liquid petroleum, Operations and maintenance.
Congratulations and thanks to the Part 3 committee members, who worked hard for 5 years, through the pandemic and all, to reach this publication stage.
If you have subscription licensed access to Part 3, please make sure your provider has updated your copy on file.
Committee members can download a copy from Standards Australia’s SIM via your username and password. It is licensed only to you for your personal use, and is watermarked as such.
If you have questions about the publication, there are a few options:
ask your question or comment here below, directly on the blog (in a public forum)
you can contact the (now past) committee members if you know them: convenor Geoff Callar (retired from APA), or other key contributors such as Jeff Jones or Gabriel Pizani.
And, as always, you can email the generic info@as2885.info email address and we’ll get answers for you.
There’s no imminent plan for a launch via APGA for this, not in 2022 anyway. I’m hoping we can marshal a team to provide a seminar/workshop launch in Q1 2023, probably hosted in person in Sydney. Comment below or contact us directly if you’d attend a launch workshop for Part 3.
For the past 4 months I’ve been “promising” (indirectly and with lots of caveats of course) that AS2885.3 would be published in August. I had high hopes, but of course now it’s September so that promise hasn’t been fulfilled.
I followed up with Standards Australia this week, and they’ve apologised, and have prioritised it for publication ‘next Friday’.
So, look for AS2885.3-2022 to be available on September 9th (… or thereabouts?) (and, there’s another caveat…)
My recent webinar “Failure is Normal: A Tale of Two Bridges” generated some encouraging feedback, so I could be persuaded to present more webinars, if readers indicate sufficient interest. A couple of categories of possible topics come to mind; engineering practice, and more about learning from failure.
Engineering Practice 1) The Benefits of Engaging Independent Consultants (A discussion forum in which other independent consultants could also share their advice about how engaging independent consultants adds value to the pipeline industry.) 2) Dealing with Commercial Pressures on Engineers (My recommendations, plus an interactive session in which attendees are invited to speak up about pressure situations they have encountered and how they dealt with them.) 3) ECI and Relationship Contracting: • Common contracting strategy options and appropriate application for each; • Basics of “two stage” relationship contracting, risk sharing and mitigation, workshops recommended; pitfalls, advantages and benefits.
Learning from Failure 4) Sources of disaster information – Pros and Cons of each (Book recommendations, news articles, safety websites, Wikipedia, Royal Commissions, Inquiries, Coroner’s Reports, etc.)
If you liked “A Tale of Two Bridges”, there’s a couple more “disaster parallels” opportunities I could develop and present such as: 5) Runaway Trains: The Lac Megantic disaster and the BHP ore train in the Pilbara. 6) Deadly Thrill Rides: The Royal Adelaide Show (2014); Dreamworld (2016); and USA events.
There may be other topics that you would like to see addressed in a webinar, so just reply to let me know what interests you. Ted Metcalfe
There is enough interest in Ted Metcalfe’s book list, and the idea of learning from failures, that it’s time to set up a book club. It’s a book club for people in the pipeline engineering industry, interested in learning from failures. Answering the question “what happened?”, and being better engineers and pipeliners because we’ve paid attention to the lessons.
In a “book club” type of environment, we can assign ‘required reading’, but more importantly, there is the opportunity to discuss what we’ve read, learned or thought about each month. That’s what I’m looking forward to.
The first meeting, a kickoff meeting to check interest and participation, will be held on Monday August 1st , 16:30 – 17:30 AEST, via either Zoom or MS Teams.
Put it in your calendar for now. In the next week or so, I’ll set up a signup link and meeting invitations to confirm interest. That will appear here on the blog.
This link may not be functional forever. I have a copy of an mp4 file, and will post it if this link stops working.
A fencing contractor is doing his job, and then gets a fright.
Many risk reviews (AS2885 Safety Management Studies) try to address this clear threat to pipelines. Depth of cover goes some way, but awareness is what we often end up relying upon.
So the problem is, preventing this often relies on the behaviour of others.
This is not always science, it’s psychology.
The question is: why was the fencing contractor not aware of the buried service?
So maybe consider more than the unfortunate fencing contractor. What about the pipeline operator’s community/land user liaison program?
Gaining awareness of things which have not turned out well for others helps us to get better at what we do so that we don’t repeat mistakes others have made.
Industry codes and standards record the wisdom and experience accumulated by many engineers over many years for the benefit of all engineers, and these need to be updated regularly for various reasons including knowledge of things which have not turned out well.
In his book The Making of an Expert Engineer, Prof. James Trevelyan states at Page 57:
Technical standards have been created through the experience of other engineers and are carefully negotiated within each specialised engineering discipline, striking a balance between restrictions to promote safety and ease of use, while also avoiding constraints that would inhibit innovation and design freedom.
That’s an excellent description of what the engineers on our Standards committees do all the time.
In the Australian pipeline industry we have an excellent Standard (AS 2885) to work with because we revise it regularly to keep up to date with new information. Awareness of poor outcomes is one of the things that has informed the continued evolution of the Australian Standard in a way that pipeline engineers in other countries envy.
Here’s some examples of links between past events and the current Standard:
Part 1 Clause 13.2 (a) requires project design records include as-built data.
Example: Due to a contractual issue, the as-built survey data for an HDD was not provided to the client. A few years later, during third-party works near the HDD, the original design drawings were assumed to be accurate. They were not. The third-party works punctured the pipeline far below the surface, and the client ended up replacing the entire HDD string.
The AS2885 suite requires detailed attention to SCC and Fracture Control. In 1982, a major rupture of the Moomba Sydney Pipeline over some distance prompted a lot of research and investigation associated with Stress Corrosion Cracking and the importance of Fracture Control to arrest running fractures. The outputs of the research and investigations have resulted in revisions to AS 2885 in several areas.
AIV and FIV(Vibration) AS2885.1 now includes clear delineation between “linepipe” and “piping”, and makes specific reference to AIV and FIV as potential failure modes. The unexpected discovery of an integrity threat on a relatively new pipeline system, and the research associated with mitigation of that threat, have now been incorporated in to AS2885 as revisions in several areas including the vibration Appendix.
Knowledge of such events leads to a better understanding of the intent of the Standard, but sometimes the background for changes in the Standard is not widely known by those who use it.
Sharing of stories about things which have not turned out as planned is one way to increase awareness for better understanding of the intent of the Standard.
Sometimes that requires sharing stories with others about things that we ourselves have not done well, which can be embarrassing.
Despite the reluctance to share such stories, the AS2885.info team and others believe that we can and should get better at helping others learn through sharing stories.
If you are intrigued by the concept of sharing stories to help others better understand what went wrong and avoid making the same mistakes, please contact us.
Experienced engineers are able to make engineering judgements with confidence. Some of the reasons why pipeline engineers using AS2885 may benefit from asking a question in relation to confidence include:
1) Maybe you are required to make a decision in relation to application of the Standard, but just don’t quite have the confidence to do so, and a second opinion would help.
…I don’t know enough about this, but I’ll bet someone else around here does…
2) Maybe you have been told by your supervisor or an experienced colleague that a certain clause means one thing, but their interpretation does not seem quite right to you, and you would like a second opinion without openly challenging your colleagues.
…that’s not what I think it means; I need more guidance here…
3) Maybe you have witnessed what you think might be an incorrect or inappropriate practice, and before making any fuss about it in your own workplace you would like to quietly get a second opinion from an independent source, without disclosing why you are asking.
…I’m pretty sure this isn’t right, but I need confirmation…
4) Maybe you are involved with modifications to a rather old pipeline for which not all of the usual design and inspection material is available, and you are unsure as to exactly how the current Standard should be applied.
…this pipeline is older than me, and it needs help… and so do I…
5) Maybe you are afraid that your question will be considered by other as a dumb question, and you don’t want to ask in the office and risk looking silly for not knowing the answer already.
…I’m not dumb, but I feel that way…
This last point prompts me to describe how I learned a very important lesson about asking questions quite early in my career when I was working in a sour gas processing plant:
Amoco Canada processed a lot of highly toxic hydrogen sulphide gas and the gas plant where I was working had experienced a serious accident. As a very junior engineer I was allowed to attend the meeting of management convened to examine the causes and work out a way forward, but I didn’t understand everything that was being discussed.
At one point I bravely put up my hand and said “Can I ask a stupid question?”
The plant manager replied calmly from the other end of the table “Son, in this industry, there are no stupid questions, only dead people who failed to ask the questions, so how can we help you?”
Ever since then I have had the confidence to ask a question when I didn’t understand something.
You can ask the AS2885.info team any questions which might help you be a better pipeline engineer – that’s what we’re here for.
We learn new information in many ways, and for many different reasons. Even when we are not trying to learn, or don’t think we need to learn, we seem to gather valuable information.
For some people, lessons are really only learned if they are learned the hard way, from the bitter experience of having done something wrong with unexpected (sometimes embarrassing, painful or expensive) consequences.
It’s a lot easier to learn by asking questions.
In the Introduction of Part 0, it is acknowledged that AS2885 sets out specific requirements in some areas, but notes that these do not replace the need for appropriate experience and engineering judgement.
In Clause 1.5.7 of AS2885 Part 0, competence is defined as having an appropriate combination of knowledge, skills and experience to safely and effectively perform the task required as requirements for users of AS2885.
Users of AS2885 are required to apply engineering judgement.
It can be said that engineering judgement requires a combination of both knowledge and the confidence to make decisions, where:
– Knowledge is the accumulation of relevant factual material, and
– Confidence is the self-courage required to interpret both the relevant circumstances being considered and the application of the Standard to those circumstances, and to make decisions on that basis.
Experienced engineers have learned that one of the easiest and most important ways to learn is to simply ask questions, and for pipeline engineers, that’s one of the main reasons that the AS2885.info wiki was created.
We’re here to help you learn, and we look forward to having users of our Standard ask questions.
AS2885-INFO.blog 