CER Pipeline Incident Data

Use in your agent

Load CER pipeline incidents into pandas and Parquet. Checked against the provider's documentation on Nov 1, 2026.

Access

• No account or key. The comprehensive incident CSV and its data dictionary are public downloads.

Request

curl -O 'https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/open/incident/pipeline-incidents-comprehensive-data.csv'

Format

Wide CSV with incident identifiers, classifications, event dates, operator and pipeline details, coordinates, release and substance fields, cause categories, status, impacts, equipment and investigation fields.

Load into pandas and Parquet

Needs Python 3 with requests, pandas and pyarrow.

"""CER comprehensive pipeline incidents -> pandas -> Parquet. No key."""
import io
import requests
import pandas as pd

URL = "https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/open/incident/pipeline-incidents-comprehensive-data.csv"
r = requests.get(URL, timeout=120)
r.raise_for_status()
df = pd.read_csv(io.BytesIO(r.content), encoding="cp1252", low_memory=False)
df["Reported Date"] = pd.to_datetime(df["Reported Date"], format="%m/%d/%Y", errors="coerce", utc=True)
df.to_parquet("cer_pipeline_incidents.parquet", index=False)
print(len(df), "incidents", int(df["Year"].min()), "to",
      int(df["Year"].max()), len(df.columns), "columns")

Run by us on 2026-11-01 (python 3.13.5 | pandas 3.1.0 | pyarrow 26.0.0 | requests 2.34.2). Result: 2039 incidents 2008 to 2026 102 columns

Limits

• Rate limit: Not stated.
• The provider says the dataset is updated quarterly.
• No download-size cap is stated.

Quirks

• The CSV is Windows-1252 rather than UTF-8; use cp1252 decoding.
• Occurrence, discovery, report and closure timestamps have different meanings and some values are blank.
• The file is wide and mixes numeric values with text such as Not Applicable; retain nullable columns and consult the dictionary.

Terms and attribution

• Open Government Licence – Canada permits lawful reuse, including commercial use.
• Acknowledge the source and, where possible, link to the licence.

Sources

• https://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/7dffedc4-23fa-440c-a36d-adf5a6cc09f1: “The data ranges from 2008 to current; it is updated quarterly.”
• https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/open/incident/pipeline-incidents-comprehensive-data.csv: “"Incident Number","Incident Types","Reported Date"”
• https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/open/incident/pipeline-incidents-data-dictionary.csv: “Column,Data Value or Column Name Indication,Description of Data Value or Column Name”
• https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada: “Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.”