U.S. District Court for the NMI designated Judge David O. Carter granted Friday a joint request by the U.S. government and the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. to reserve $275,000 for inspections of the CUC oil pipeline. <\/p>\n
The $275,000 shall come from CUC\u2019s Technical Manager for Oil fund and will be placed in a separate CUC account to be used for the in-line inspection of the pipeline. <\/p>\n
In-line inspection, also called intelligent or \u201csmart pigging,\u201d refers to an assessment of a pipeline from the interior of the pipe using an inspection tool.<\/p>\n
The old pipeline was an aboveground pipe that received fuel from the Mobil Oil facility at the port on Saipan and pumped it to Power Plants 1 and 2 in Lower Base.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had stated that, unless the old pipeline is repaired or replaced, it poses a threat to the nearby ocean.<\/p>\n
An Environmental and Engineering Management Company then constructed a new fuel pipeline at the same location. It became operational in 2016.<\/p>\n
In their joint stipulation, U.S. Department of Justice Environmental Enforcement Section senior attorney Bradley O\u2019Brien and CNMI deputy attorney general Lillian Tenorio said that a \u201csmart pig\u201d in-line inspection was conducted in 2018, to ensure that the new pipe meets industry standards and the Stipulated Order No. 2 requirements.<\/p>\n
SO2 refers to court-mandated projects that focus on oil issues and also apply to oil spills and the remediation of the contaminated power plants.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Brien and Tenorio said the EEMC and the parties agree that the pipeline should be regularly inspected in the future. The next scheduled inspection is in 2023.<\/p>\n
CUC agrees to the 2023 in-line inspection \u201csmart pig\u201d analysis and that the results will be reviewed by a third party.<\/p>\n
CUC agrees that the $275,000 set aside for this inspection cannot be used for other purposes without the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
U.S. District Court for the NMI designated Judge David O. Carter granted Friday a joint…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[49],"class_list":["post-293253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cuc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}