Steve Bromley spent years watching pipeline crews leave problem-plagued pipes in the ground.
The former safety inspector, who quit in 2021, says oil and gas pipes were sometimes dented by rocks, with their protective coating peeling off and their walls rusted through.
But when Bromley, a supporter of President-elect Donald Trump who calls himself “absolutely pro-pipeline,” eventually complained about it to federal regulators, they told him the companies weren’t violating any rules.
“Their paperwork was in order. That’s all they’ve got to look at,” Bromley said, later adding: “I know they’re in order, because I’m the one who puts them in order. It’s all swept under the rug.”
Bromley’s experience illustrates the pitfalls of the way Congress directed the federal government to regulate pipelines, according to safety advocates. Under what is called “performance-based” regulation, companies draft their plans for meeting safety standards, which are approved by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.
Private inspectors — who work for contractors paid by pipeline companies — then check to see if they are following the plan.
“The reality is that operators are inspecting their own systems,” said Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, the country’s main pipeline safety advocacy group. “And PHMSA is largely going through paperwork exercises to make sure that they documented those inspections to the appropriate level.”
Inspectors like Bromley rarely speak publicly about their jobs. In recent years, at least three other inspectors have lodged formal whistleblower allegations that they were fired for reporting dangerous problems on pipelines, and several inspectors told POLITICO’s E&E News earlier this year that their safety warnings are often ignored. Bromley also filed a whistleblower complaint, but it was dismissed.
As Bromley speaks out, the country looks ahead to a possible boom in pipeline construction.
Federal data shows 6,000 miles of pipelines for gas, oil and other liquids are on the drawing board or under construction right now. As many as 65,000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines will be needed for the country to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to experts. And thousands of miles of pipeline could be needed if, as currently anticipated, U.S. liquefied natural gas exports double by 2028.
The fossil fuel industry says the country’s performance-based approach to pipeline safety gives pipeline companies, who know their systems best, the flexibility they need to make their facilities safe.
“Our industry is committed to its goal of operating with zero incidents through comprehensive management systems and programs,” Robin Rorick, vice president of midstream policy at the American Petroleum Institute, said in a statement emailed to E&E News. “We will continue to work with PHMSA and industry experts to help protect the environment and communities where we live and work.”
A PHMSA official said pipeline companies are required by law “to assess (and reassess) their systems on an ongoing basis to identify safety risks.” The agency has a long-standing policy against attributing remarks to staff members.
“They must also maintain detailed records, accessible to PHMSA inspectors,” the official said in a statement to E&E News, “and those records need to justify operator claims as well as be subject to ongoing PHMSA oversight.”
Congress is currently working on reauthorizing the nation’s pipeline safety laws. So far, lawmakers are focused on speeding up permitting for new pipelines — and are not revisiting the performance-based aspect of regulation.
But PHMSA is currently changing its regulations to strengthen leak detection requirements, the agency official said. The final rule could be published as early as January. The official also pointed out that PHMSA enforcement fines have increased in recent years, reaching an all-time high of $12.6 million last year.
Trump has promised to dramatically reduce regulation of the pipeline and oil industries, and executives from those industries are among his top donors.
GTN pipeline
Bromley, 54, is an avid outdoorsman who lives in Richland, Washington. His Facebook page is splashed with sagebrush landscapes and trophy shots from his hunting trips, along with scenes from his pipeline work and memes supporting Trump.
He started his career as a welder, sometimes on pipelines, sometimes on ships, sometimes on construction sites. He switched to inspecting pipelines around 2005.
He was an inspector for 18 years, working the last eight years almost entirely on projects for TransCanada, which became TC Energy in 2019. While he technically worked for a contracting firm called QCS Onshore, which later became Workrise, TC Energy set his pay and decided which jobs he was offered, he said.
Bromley quit in 2021, when Workrise announced that TC Energy was cutting the pay of safety inspectors by 10 percent. Workrise did not respond to a request for comment.
Soon after, Bromley brought his safety concerns to PHMSA. He said he has since been blackballed from getting new contract work in the field and is now caring for his elderly father full-time.
“Of course I’m disgruntled. They have a history of putting profit over safety,” he said, before emphasizing that his concerns are shared by other inspectors and pipeline workers he knows. “They’re all disgruntled. Every single one of them, but they need the job.”
Bromley is especially concerned about Gas Transmission Northwest, a 63-year-old TC Energy natural gas pipeline spanning the Pacific Northwest. Most of his work for the last eight years of his inspecting career were spent monitoring GTN, which transports as much as 2.7 billion cubic feet a day of natural gas from Canada to customers in Washington, Oregon and California.
“We’ve got some serious issues. We’ve got pipes sitting on rocks with bends and cracks,” he said. “We’ve got pipe that’s falling apart in sheets. We’ve got a company that knows about these conditions and fails to be proactive about repairing them.”
GTN’s safety record is better than most. Of the 60 gas transmission systems with more than 1,000 miles, PHMSA records show GTN has a lower rate of “significant” accidents than 46 systems and a higher rate than 13 others.
Since 2002, PHMSA has hit the GTN system with 17 enforcement actions, including five notices of proposed violation. The agency has not taken enforcement action against the GTN system since 2019.
But Bromley is not the first TC Energy worker to criticize the company’s safety practices. Evan Vokes, a Canadian engineer, was fired by the company in 2012, when it was still called TransCanada, after he raised safety concerns about the Bison natural gas pipeline before it exploded in July 2011 in Wyoming.
TC Energy also grappled with safety problems when it built and operated the Keystone pipeline, which spilled more than a million gallons of crude in eight incidents. Independent investigations traced some of the problems back to construction and inspection errors.
The company was also behind the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. But after President Joe Biden revoked the pipeline’s permit to cross the U.S.-Canadian border, TC Energy canceled the project. It later spun off its oil pipeline business. However, since winning back the White House in November, Trump is looking to revive the project, according to POLITICO.
TC Energy is now working to modify the GTN pipeline to pump about 6 percent more natural gas through it at higher pressure.
“GTN and TC Energy have a history of failing to meet regulatory requirements, accidents, and controversies relating to safety and reliability of its systems,” Erin Sutherland, the Pipeline Safety Trust’s counsel and program director, wrote in comments to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission opposing the planned GTN expansion.
Bromley’s safety concerns worry Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has opposed the expansion on cost and environmental grounds.
“These latest safety allegations are just another reason for concern,” Wyden said in a statement emailed to E&E News. “People in every corner of the Pacific Northwest deserve better.”
TC Energy said safety is the company’s top priority.
“We take our responsibility for safety very seriously,” TC Energy said in an emailed statement responding to Bromley’s allegations, “and are committed to safe and reliable operations throughout our pipeline network in North America. We have a robust safety and integrity program and regularly inspect our systems.”
The company also noted that PHMSA officials did an investigation of Bromley’s safety claims, including meeting with TC Energy officials, and found that the company was not in violation.
The statement stressed that Bromley was not an employee of TC Energy, but a contractor, which is common practice in the industry.
“Out of respect for the legal process and for Mr. Bromley,” the statement said, “we will not publicly discuss this matter further or comment on his unproven allegations.”
‘Raining down sheets of rust’
In 2014, Bromley was working as chief inspector on a project to replace 500 feet of GTN pipe near Ione, Oregon, in the arid sagebrush steppe of the Columbia plateau, 150 miles east of Portland.
Pipeline companies run sophisticated instruments through their lines to detect “anomalies” like cracks and dents and measure whether corrosion has worn away the pipe wall. It’s called “in-line inspection,” or ILI.
An inspection had flagged spots where corrosion had eaten away 78 percent of the pipe. When wall loss reaches 80 percent, federal regulations require the company to do something immediately. That can be shutting the pipeline down and replacing the deteriorated segment or pumping less gas in order to reduce the pressure.
Bromley said that when he saw the damage, he was shocked to realize the pipeline had been operating up until that day. It looked like the instruments had underestimated the corrosion of the pipeline, he said, because some spots appeared to be rusted all the way through.
Once the crews dug out around the pipeline, they started beating the pipes with brass hammers to knock off loose coating. But Bromley said chunks of the pipeline were falling off.
“It was thunk, thunk, thunk,” he said. “It’s just raining down sheets of rust.”
He picked up a chunk of corroded pipe and kept it. He later posted a photo online, adding, “We actually sandblasted completely through the pipe in multiple joints.” He still has the chunk, though TC Energy and Workrise later tried to get him to return it.
The crew replaced about 500 feet of pipe. But they left behind two adjacent segments of pipe that had already been patched twice with metal “sleeves” and in addition, had 150 corrosion spots, dents or other anomalies. Bromley says he was shocked at the decision to leave the segments unrepaired.
“We had a contractor sitting there with equipment, extra joints of pre-tested replacement pipe, and could have cut out 2 additional joints which contained 2 more repair sleeves and over 150 anomalies,” he would later write to PHMSA. But they didn’t. “It was not in the budget.”
There were other examples, he said: using pipe from factories with unqualified welders, machines dumping rocks on pipes, leaky fittings not getting replaced.
That doesn’t square, he said, with TC Energy’s public promotion of its “culture of safety.” Its website stresses that “our commitment to safety isn’t just a mantra — it’s how we work 24/7, 365 days of the year across our entire organization.”
Bromley would put his safety concerns in his reports and sometimes complain to his colleagues. But it wasn’t until he quit that he took it further.
“I guess I decided to let some of these integrity concerns out,” he said.
Bromley said he and a PHMSA inspector corresponded at length, developing a handful of main issues: unqualified welders welding pipe, a buckled pipe in Illinois, widely used fittings that were known to leak, defects in new pipe on a line to a power plant in Oregon.
In December 2022, the PHMSA inspector met with TC Energy officials about Bromley’s accusations. According to a document shown to E&E News, the inspector told the company officials he had “no preliminary concerns.”
In March 2023, the PHMSA inspector sent Bromley an update: “As a result of this review, no violations were warranted and this case will be closed.”
The inspector added that “a full inspection” of TC Energy’s pipelines was scheduled for later in the year “and any violations will be addressed.” PHMSA records show that an “integrated inspection” that began in January 2023 is still open today.
Bromley was stunned. He’d expected his detailed, illustrated disclosures would result in violations and a fine.
“I find it disappointing that companies like TC Energy are allowed to operate high pressure gas transmission pipelines that have been allowed to degrade to the point that they leak,” he wrote back to the agency inspector. “TC Energy has consistently put profit over public safety.”
A PHMSA official, responding to Bromley’s account, said the agency’s investigation of his complaint “included a thorough review of in-line test results, documentation of repairs and welding fabrication.”
The official said that the agency “pays close attention” in inspections to the condition of pipe walls and signs of deterioration, and requires companies to do a “comprehensive and ongoing risk analysis.”
“If an issue is identified, we’ll work with the operator to ensure the issue is fixed and, if necessary, will take regulatory action to force those improvements,” the official said.
PHMSA had also directed Bromley to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which administers the pipeline safety whistleblower program. But OSHA officials dismissed his complaint without investigating, saying what he alleged — that TC Energy wouldn’t rehire him because of his complaints to PHMSA — didn’t add up to retaliation.
Bromley appealed and earlier this year reached a settlement with TC Energy and Workrise for an amount he said he can’t disclose.
In that process, he says, the attorney for Workrise unsuccessfully tried to get him to sign a confidentiality agreement.
He believes the request to be illegal under Washington state’s “Silenced No More Act” banning confidentiality agreements and is pursuing legal action against Workrise and TC Energy.
