Bold Nebraska director Jane Kleeb appeared on MSNBC’s “NOW With Alex Wagner” on Tuesday, May 27 to discuss the recent action taken by U.S. pipeline safety regulator PHMSA — which placed new safety restrictions on TransCanada after documenting the shoddy work the company did while constructing the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline.
The PHMSA report on TransCanada noted, “From the start of welding, TransCanada experienced a high weld rejection rate… Over 72 percent of welds required repairs during one week. In another week, TransCanada stopped welding work after 205 of 425 welds required repair.”
What’s more, “In high risk projects such as nuclear submarines or nuclear power plants, even one-tenth of a percent rate of bad welds would be a cause for concern,” according to certified welder, forensic engineer and professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Bea.
“The level of defects is indeed cause for alarm and indicative of something that is going on in the Keystone organization that isn’t satisfactory,” Bea told the Associated Press.
