"I have been in a lot of "events" in my 40 years, and the most dangerous of all safeties is the illusion of safety. ... We call this an operational setup for failure – very bad in risk management approaches." -- Richard B. Kuprewicz, President of Accufacts Inc.

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You can prevent explosions in your school. 

Yes, it is painful to threaten the illusion of safety in a school or community and to talk about death and loss. The New London survivors did not talk about their pain for more than forty years.  They teach us that it is even more painful to live with a tragedy when opportunities to prevent loss were ignored or overlooked.

March 18, 2012 is the 75th anniversary of the 1937 Texas School Explosion.

Data kept secret on risk, failings of plastic pipe

09/26/2011 By Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer

The type of plastic pipe that caused a natural gas explosion and fire in a Cupertino condominium last month has long been considered a potential threat to the public, but federal pipeline regulators have allowed companies to keep it in the ground and secretly gather limited information about its failings, a Chronicle investigation shows.

Companies such as Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which owns the line that caused the Cupertino blast, don't have to routinely report what they know about failure rates of particular brands of plastic pipes, even to the federal and state agencies that regulate pipeline operators. The federal government, bowing to industry resistance, has never required it.

Officials with the California Public Utilities Commission, which oversees PG&E, say the utility does account for plastic pipe leaks in quarterly reports, but does not indicate the maker of the pipes involved. PG&E provides that and other key information about plastic pipe failures on a voluntary, anonymous basis to an industry-maintained confidential database.

Timothy Alan Simon, one of the five PUC members appointed by the governor, said that should change.

"These are gas lines coming to your home," Simon said. "Every resident should have a certain level of assurance that we are not hiding information that they need to know to determine safety."

Much More... 

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Plastic natural gas pipe failure data kept secret  Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, September 26, 2011

Read article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/25/MNAH1L8QMB.DTL&ao=all#ixzz1Z4K5vG8S

... Richard Kuprewicz, a consultant from Redmond, Wash., who advises federal regulators on pipeline safety, said keeping data hidden blinds regulators.

The current system, he said, creates "the illusion of safety, in that it gives people the impression that someone is keeping real data that means something. It may or may not - most likely not."