March 15, 2019 — Chester County Department of Emergency Services requested a copy of our emergency response plan. In accordance with Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) guidelines, we referred Chester County to PHMSA for this information. Anyone is welcome to request copies of response plans from PHMSA. In this case, we did work with PHMSA to facilitate the sharing of our Facility Response Plan to Chester County’s Deputy Director for Emergency Management.
It is important to clarify that a Facility Response Plan (FRP) is a more detailed version of an Emergency Response Plan, which is what it appears the County is more familiar with. Our FRP includes all of our assets in the area. As such, PHMSA, is the guardian of the plan and must redact certain information for security reasons before providing it to the public. This is standard practice for PHMSA and not something specific to this request.
Additionally, at the request of the Chester County Department of Emergency Services, we have previously supplied copies of our Standard Operating Procedures for responding to emergency situations. We have also met with over 40 schools that are in the vicinity of ME1 and ME2 to discuss emergency response planning, including those school districts in Chester County. In addition, we have trained more than 2,342 emergency responders through our Mariner Emergency Responder Outreach (MERO) sessions including more than 260 emergency responders from Chester County. In Delaware County, we’ve held eight MERO sessions, four of which took place recently in 2018.
We share Chester County’s focus on pipeline safety and will continue to work with their leadership, and the public, to supply important safety information and training.