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Support to Federal Rule Making On
behalf of the Department of Transportation (DOT), the Office of Pipeline
Safety (OPS), and the American Petroleum Institute (API), Destiny’s
Ken Spitze led a GIS-based feasibility study designed to develop and
evaluate various selection criteria proposed to identify Unusually
Sensitive Areas (USAs) for use in pipeline risk assessment and integrity
management pending Federal Rule Making. The study included: 1) evaluating and advising on the use of GIS in a typical data collection, USA identification, risk assessment, regulatory reporting, and decision support process; 2) using GIS to test assumptions and impacts related to the USA definition criteria (for example varying the criteria while identifying the number of pipelines and operators affected by changing or varying the criteria); and 3) conducting benchmark studies utilizing GIS to analyze, identify, and report concern areas in a central California pilot project emphasizing risks to public water supplies, wellhead protection areas, sole source aquifers, and other sensitive areas. Through all phases of the study, GIS was used extensively to collect, integrate, and validate data from public sources; to map and analyze the various criteria used to identify USAs, to map and analyze USAs compared to existing pipelines in order to identify risks and concern areas; and when a risk to public drinking water was identified, using GIS to analyze additional data to identify an alternate water resource. Current details are available at http://ops.dot.gov.
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