Six years ago, a neighborhood in San Bruno, California was rocked by an explosion. The cause was an unsafe natural gas pipeline. Eight people were killed. The ensuing litigation around what happened, and Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PGE) culpability, has been enlightening. Evidence that PG&E “shopped” for judges, paid off officials, and completely impeded any meaningful probe into the blast has leaked out at a steady pace over the past few years. Another blow to PG&E’s claim of innocence in this event was levied today as a jury found that PG&E obstructed the federal probe and violated pipeline safety laws—before AND after the tragedy.
The jury found PG&E guilty of five felony counts of knowingly failing to inspect and test its gas lines for potential dangers, in addition to the felony obstruction count. The panel also found that company officials had tried to derail the San Bruno investigation by denying a practice of pumping natural gas through aging pipelines at excessive pressures.
Unfortunately, all those criminals who have names and faces don’t seem to be in any meaningful trouble.
San Bruno Mayor Jim Ruane said city officials had wanted federal prosecutors to file criminal charges against top PG&E executives, who “made conscious decisions to put safety on the bottom of their list.” Only the company was charged, not its current or former officials.
One of the main reasons for the explosion was an old and defective seam in the pipeline that PG&E reported as not existing. They saw a seam that needed to be updated because it was old and didn’t live up to today’s safety standards, and they pretended that it didn’t exist so that they would not have to deal with the cost of updating the pipeline. PG&E was able to get around more serious criminal proceedings because they cannot seem to locate any real paperwork or schematics of what the pipeline (originally built in the 1950s) looked like, or what it’s structure was. However, there is more than enough circumstantial evidence to support the idea that they either did know and did not care, or were willfully ignorant of their shoddy record-keeping, with the hopes of continuing to make profit without adding safety costs.
One charge that led to a conviction was that the company knew of two previous leaks, one of them in the San Bruno line in 1988, but failed to enter them in its database or consider them in inspection and testing plans for the pipelines.
The database contained “a ton of errors,” according to a company memo, and prosecutors said in another set of charges that PG&E managers had known they were relying on flawed records in making safety-related decisions. PG&E denied knowingly failing to maintain adequate records, and the jury acquitted the company of those charges.
Jurors convicted PG&E, however, of the most substantive charges of violating safety laws — failing to identify and evaluate potential risks, to use the most accurate assessment methods and to give the highest priority to the most serious hazards.
In the end, profit won over safety, and lives were lost, and people’s homes were destroyed.