A Day at the Iowa Utilities Board
Beverly Ohman is Engineering Manager at the Iowa Utilities Board.
The PUF team traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, the home of the Iowa Utilities Board, which got its start in 1878 as the Iowa Board of Railroad Commissioners, and later the Iowa State Commerce Commission.
PUF: Tell us what you do at the Board.
Beverly Ohman: I am the manager of the safety and engineering section, and we have four areas of responsibility. On the pipeline side, we do pipeline inspections and those are administered through the U.S. DOT Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration known as PHMSA.
They give us the authority to do those inspections within the state, and we also have an interstate agreement. Through PHMSA we have three grants. One is a base grant, which handles all of our inspections. Another is a damage prevention grant, and then finally a One Call grant. All of those are administered by the Safety and Engineering section of the IUB.
I'm excited to say from a damage prevention standpoint, the results of our November 2018 audit show we are meeting safety requirements.