This is not a feel-good post. My apologies.
PG&E has gone to the California Public Utilities Commission, pleading that their liability insurance costs are 4x after the big wildfires last year: those fires that were sparked by unmaintained PG&E utility lines brushing trees in their right-of-way, which should have been trimmed by them and were not, causing arcing. They specifically want their ratepayers to reimburse them for fires caused by their lack of maintenance on their lines.
The San Bruno gas pipe that exploded had had a sewer line criss-crossing it that was replaced two years ago by explosives bursting it outward as a new sewer pipe went in.
This was a few feet from the high-pressure 30″ gas line.
Which PG&E said it inspected afterwards. According to the local newspapers, when pressed hard this week, they admitted no, not internally they didn’t, not that stretch of it, and no the type of pipe was not now up to code, no it shouldn’t have had that seam, that’s not standard, no, we didn’t know it was corroded. Because we didn’t look inside that particular section after the sewer work.
There was a homeowner whose walls cracked after the same sewer company used that same method near his home in Millbrae. (He sued, they settled.)
PG&E just spent nearly $50 million in ratepayers’ dollars trying to push a fraudulently-presented election measure that would have given them monopoly status and shut down many cities’ efforts to go green. When Prop 16 failed, they tried within days to get regulators to let them raise rates to cover the amount they’d spent on that campaign.
Think how far that money could have gone towards trimming trees that make the power lines arc. Towards replacing old and substandard pipes.
PG&E is trying to look magnanimous towards the homeowners whose friends and neighborhood they just blew up by offering them money they want their customers to then have to provide. Again, they want their shareholders to have a direct disincentive for holding them responsible for maintenance and public safety. As a friend put it, only the profits are privatized.
One of those who burned to death, Jacqueline Grieg, was a CPUC regulator of their lines.
Now they want her co-workers to make her heirs have to help pay for killing her.
Utter, bitter, classic chutzpah.
One might think the CEO who’s running the corporate culture of Pacific Gas And–the word that unfortunately leaps to mind is–Evil would have the sense to wear a little financial sackcloth of upgrading equipment and getting the actual work done that the public pays for while so many of San Bruno Mountain’s families, the ones still alive, stand among only ashes.
Fire the guy. And CPUC, please, do right by us all. In Grieg’s memory.