HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) — The T-shaped connector found by the National Transportation Safety Board to have failed before the deadly March 2023 West Reading candy factory explosion was made of a plastic still in widespread use in Pennsylvania, the state’s top utility regulator said Tuesday.

And the roadmap to making Pennsylvanians safer — Steve DeFrank, chairman of the Public Utility Commission (PUC), said — will be similar to the path followed after five people died in 2011 when a natural gas explosion ripped through downtown Allentown.

“And what caused that was cast iron [piping],” DeFrank said. “Today, 13 years later, 89% of cast iron has been removed from Pennsylvania because we focused on the material, and focused on replacement of it. We want to take that same success story and apply that to the first-generation plastics,” generally manufactured and installed between about 1960 and 1982.

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This Week in Pennsylvania

Those plastics, DeFrank said, are vulnerable both because of their age and because of inferior design and manufacturing techniques compared to modern PVC piping.

In August, the PUC released a tentative order to natural gas utilities that “asked companies to give us an inventory of what they have and then give us plans for how you’re going to assess risk on it and how you’re going to remove it based on riskiest pieces of your system,” DeFrank said.

Some areas are riskier than others because of other demands placed on the piping, he said — for example, the NTSB found a confluence of other issues contributed to failure of the West Reading line which, in turn, led to the explosion at the R.M. Palmer factory.

The reception to the tentative order among utilities has been lukewarm.

DeFrank said the findings of the PUC’s own ongoing investigation will complement the NTSB’s.

“The NTSB’s is going to be more of an industrywide review — a ‘50,000-foot view’ as opposed to a ‘10,000-foot view,’ – what their findings are for the industry” nationally, DeFrank said. “We will then take that and put a Pennsylvania touch and flair to it.”

Separately, DeFrank also said Tuesday a dispute last year about whether (because of conflicting federal and state laws) the PUC should or could provide certain documents to the NTSB wasn’t the reason he was in Harrisburg Tuesday — rather than at the hearing in Washington — and hadn’t hindered the investigation.

“The ‘boots on the ground’ are working together every day,” DeFrank said. “And that’s what’s important, because that’s what’s keeping Pennsylvanians safe.”

Reflecting on the late-2023 dispute, “The NTSB was looking at it, and I understand their point was, ‘We’re the federal government; we preempt state law.’ I certainly agree with them,” DeFrank said. “The problem is, [Pennsylvania law] has criminal liability for the state official [for providing the information NTSB was demanding unless ordered by a judge]. So if I give that out, I can go to jail for that…. So what they needed was to go to court and get a subpoena. We settled with them on a subpoena. So it was it was sort of a process we had to take to comply with state law.”

Now that the NTSB has established the incident’s probable cause, “We’re going to take their findings and incorporate them with our investigation,” DeFrank said. “Typically, we have a great relationship with NTSB — a very complementary relationship.”

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