Eight people died as a result of the very preventable pipeline explosion in September 2010
Years before the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion that killed eight people, engineers knew that there needed to be specific testing done on the
already troubled pipeline.
The missing information concerned what caused the 50-mile-long pipeline to spring a leak in October 1988 near Crystal Springs Reservoir, south of where the line later exploded. The cause became an issue when PG&E was drawing up plans 15 years later to comply with a new federal requirement that all gas transmission pipelines be inspected.
If a line has a history of failed seams — the eventual cause of the San Bruno explosion — federal law requires that it be checked with a method that can detect such a problem, such as pumping it full of water at high pressure.
The problem for PG&E in 2003, when they were trying to make sure that their pipeline was up to snuff, was that it is expensive to test for stuff. They opted to cut costs by conducting less expensive testing that only ferrets out corrosion. The corner, as we all know, cuts deeper since if you don't find out about problems in your pipeline you don't have to spend money to fix those problems. Maybe I am being a bit too cynical and possibly too harsh? The
Chronicle inspected the map that PG&E engineers created in order to highlight the 1988 leak and make sure that their
cash cow pipeline was lawful.
At the top of the map someone wrote, “ERW concerns.” ERW stands for electric resistance welds, which have been linked to hundreds of seam failures on pipelines and which existed on stretches of the San Bruno line.
The map was never turned over to the National Transportation Safety Board when it investigated the cause of the San Bruno disaster. The Chronicle recently obtained it from a source who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
The document not only has an arrow pointing to the 1988 leak, it has an engineer’s handwritten note saying information about the incident was not in the company’s pipeline data spreadsheet. That spreadsheet was PG&E’s main source of information for supporting its inspection method.
[bold my emphasis]
Consider this: the San Bruno blast has exposed an untoward relationship between PG&E and state regulators and, even with the deck loaded, they're still facing a historic $1.6 billion in penalties.
PG&E officials and public relations mechanics will try to spin all of this as "complicated" and the result of some flaw or "communication" breakdown within the organization.
“We have a night-and-day different approach to integrity management,” said Greg Snapper, a PG&E spokesman. He said the company has satisfied all the measures federal investigators called for as a result of the San Bruno blast.
Oh, it's
night and day? Tell that to the families of the eight people dead as the result of their greed and willful negligence.