As the California Public Utilities Commission began a new round of hearings in San Francisco today into PG&E’s pipeline record-keeping, Carmel Mayor Jason Burnett called for sweeping reforms and possibly a break-up of the utility.
“We are demanding major reforms of PG&E, including its record-keeping practices, so that no more lives are risked by the ticking time bombs beneath our communities,” Burnett said at a news conference in San Francisco.
He suggested the reforms could be either “breaking up PG&E or completely overhauling its corporate culture, including all of its record-keeping practices.”
Burnett spoke shortly before a CPUC administrative law judge began a four-day evidentiary hearing into a 2014 pipeline explosion in Carmel and five other episodes in which workers accidentally punctured incorrectly documented pipelines in four cities.
The purpose of the proceeding is to determine whether PG&E violated any laws or regulations on record-keeping. If the administrative judge determines PG&E broke the laws, she could impose a fine, which could then be appealed to the five-member commission.
The current proceeding, which the commission initiated in November 2014, is separate from an earlier case in which the commission last year fined PG&E a record $1.6 billion for violations related to a fatal explosion in San Bruno in 2010.
In San Bruno, a defectively welded seam in a PG&E natural gas transmission pipeline ruptured and caused an explosion and fire that killed eight people and injured 66 others on Sept. 9, 2010. The pipeline segment was incorrectly listed in PG&E records as seamless.
In Carmel three and one-half years later, a PG&E work crew tapped into a two-inch-wide metal pipeline on March 3, 2014, without realizing it contained an active internal plastic pipeline that was not shown in the company’s records.
The internal pipe was punctured and released natural gas that migrated to a five-room wooden house, where it was ignited, probably by a stove pilot light, and exploded. The house was vacant at the time and no one was injured.
“It was a miracle nobody was killed, let alone hurt, but PG&E can’t rely on miracles to protect public safety,” Burnett said at the conference today.
The other incidents being investigated in the current proceeding occurred in Castro Valley in 2010 eight days after the San Bruno explosion, in Morgan Hill in 2012, in Milpitas in 2012 and 2013 and in Mountain View in 2013.
Either construction workers or PG&E workers struck and damaged incorrectly recorded pipelines. The accidents released natural gas and caused service disruptions but no one was injured.