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ABSTRACT: While pipeline accidents are rare, safety issues associated with residing near pipelines are of growing concern for local populations. Persons living near pipelines are at risk for property damage, injury and death associated with accidents and equipment failures. The perceived threat associated with residing near a pipeline put this issue at the forefront of the national agenda and resulted in the passage of the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act of 2002. Passage of the Act occurred without examining the non-occupational populations-at-risk for a pipeline-related incident. Therefore, we examined locational data for pipelines from the Texas Railroad Commission for five Texas city-county areas (Austin-Travis, Dallas-Dallas, Fort Worth-Tarrant, Houston-Harris and San Antonio-Bexar) along with U.S.2000 Census block group data. Using geographic information systems (GIS), Spearman correlations, and stepwise logistic regression, we evaluated the relationship between order of potential risk, as indicated by the absence or presence of a pipeline, and local population characteristics to identify populations at potential risk in urban Texas. While the overall explanatory power of the model is low, population density was found to have the most consistent explanatory power associated with the presence of a pipeline, while age, ethnicity/race and income showed mixed results