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Pacific Gas & Electric Co. will pay San Bruno, California, $70 million in restitution for the pipeline rupture that killed eight people and destroyed dozens of homes in September 2010, the utility and city said Monday.

"This money will be used for the benefit of all the citizens of our city and to help us, as a community, get beyond the tragedy and devastation caused by PG&E's explosion and fire," San Bruno Mayor Jim Ruane said in a joint news release.

Federal officials said in August that a faulty pipe, flawed operations and inadequate government oversight led to the natural gas explosion in the San Francisco suburb.

"The community of San Bruno has suffered through a terrible tragedy and we understand that this accident will affect this community forever," PG&E President Chris Johns said.

The city will establish a separate not-for-profit public purpose entity to manage the funds and determine how the restitution should be spent for the benefit of the community as a whole, the statement said.

"This $70 million payment is in addition to PG&E's commitment to fund replacement and repair of the city's infrastructure and other costs related to the accident and restoration of the neighborhood," it said. "The utility will not seek to recover the contribution through insurance or customer rates."

During a public board meeting after delivering their final report on the matter, National Transportation Safety Board investigators sharply criticized pipeline owner PG&E for the explosion, saying the pipe was inadequate from the time it was installed in 1956.

That was compounded "by a litany of failures" over the years, including poor record-keeping, inadequate inspection programs and "an integrity management program without integrity," NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said.

"It was not a question of if this pipeline would burst," she said. "It was a question of when."

Hersman said the probe yielded "troubling revelations about a company that exploited weaknesses in a lax system of oversight, and government agencies that placed a blind trust in operators to the detriment of public safety." http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/12/us/california-pge-settlement/index.html?
hpt=us_c2 is, of course, the same PG&E of Erin Brockovich fame, AND of what happened with the illegal rate hikes a couple of years ago. May they rot in hell.

Residents had said at the time that they smelled gas for a couple of days before the explosion, but PG&E had investigated and found "no cause for concern". Then this happened:



This wasn't just a little pipe exploding, it was a major disaster:

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They all thought it was an airplane.

It wasn't.

Freddy Tobar was upstairs in his kitchen getting ready to feed his Chihuahua Chiquita, when he heard popping sounds from under the ground and felt the house shaking.

He looked outside and saw his backyard crumble into the earth. Trees disintegrated into flames.

His first thought was to run outside, but the door was already melting. He pushed through, burned his hands and with his dog in one arm, ran outside with his cell phone and called his wife, Nora Orozco-Tobar.

He screamed, "I'm burning! I'm burning."

He kept running through the streets and yelling for help, but no one stopped - others were fleeing, too - until his wife picked him up at Cherry Lane and drove him to Kaiser in South San Francisco.

The quiet neighborhood of tidy homes called Claremont is tucked in a canyon in San Bruno. It burst into flames in an instant shortly after 6 p.m. Thursday. Residents, many of whom have lived there for decades, know the familiar sound of jetliners from nearby San Francisco International Airport overhead, and they just figured this was the day - the day one of them fell from the sky.

Julio Locon, 50, was at home on Concord Way with his sister-in-law and her daughter, recovering from a minor surgery he underwent Wednesday when the blast occurred a block away on Claremont Drive.

When the family rushed outside, a wall of flame surged toward them.

Locon dropped to his knees. "I said, 'Please God, save me,' and at that moment the heat went away."

Henry Sanchez was driving home from his three kids' back-to-school night at a nearby school when he approached the intersection of Claremont and Glenview.

He looked through the windshield where just a few blocks ahead of him a flash of flame crossed the sky, followed by a deafening explosion.

His three kids were at home doing homework - and located directly on the other side of the fireball, which seemed to reach 100 feet into the sky. {flames actually shot up 300 feet}

He took back roads to avoid the geyser of fire, and found his kids outside on the street.

"They were terrified," he said.

Jerry Guernsey had spent the day working on his '57 Chevy on Concord Way, just blocks from the impact, where he's lived for 25 years. He'd fired up the barbecue in his backyard when it sounded like a jetliner had dropped from the sky. "But the noise just kept going," he said.

Inside the house, his wife, Carole, looked outside where a great fireball rose into the air.

"When I walked outside," she said, "I could feel the heat."

Frankie Serressegue was with his wife Judy, and their three cats at their home on Plymouth Drive.

"I opened my door and saw a huge fireball," he said. It appeared to wipe out eight houses immediately. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/09/MNQ11FBN3G
.DTL Federal investigators condemned PG&E's safety practices, calling them shoddy. The explosion in San Bruno caused the destruction of the neighborhood and caused the death of eight people.
.....
They reported too that the seam was clearly deficient and it would not have passed "even a cursory visual inspection when a PG&E crew installed it in 1956."

PG&E had been ordered to inspect every one of its natural gas lines in California {won't happen, betcha}
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Other problems that PG&E had, included "poor record keeping, inadequate inspection programs and an integrity management program without integrity." http://www.examiner.com/top-news-in-san-francisco/sf-learns-san-bruno-
explosion-who-got-the-blame-photos-video#ixzz1ovco7XuO) got THAT right. I don't understand how this company can go on getting away with what they do, over and over. I guess I do, actually, given the state of this country, but I hate it.

...and this is the crater that resulted:

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PG&E has lost $1.2 billion in market value since the explosion. Hugh Wynne, a senior analyst at Bernstein Research, said he believed that the market had overreacted and that the stock would recover. He said he believed that the actual cost of the disaster would be closer to $500 million.

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So far, the Sept. 9 explosion has cost the company $189 million in direct costs, which have been paid from PG&E's profits rather than passed on to customers {So, fudgy records aside, they DIDN'T charge customers for that}. The company still expects to spend between $350 million and $550 million this year on work related to the blast.

The issue of whether PG&E will try to charge customers for some of the company's San Bruno costs will surface again later this month when the company files with state regulators an action plan for future pipeline work. Consumer advocates and some public officials are adamantly opposed to shifting any of those costs on to PG&E customers. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/04/BUK91KJD4M
.DTL of why their profits went up was the state regulatory agency granted them two rate hikes in between the blast and the agreement today. Wonder if they fudged to get those rate hikes, with an eye toward the settling of the San Bruno debacle?

Okay, as of today:

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The settlement comes less than a month after San Bruno officials publicly accused the company of dragging its feet in negotiations.
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As part of the deal, San Bruno agreed to cap at $50 million a separate trust fund that PG&E created. That fund, which was previously limited to $70 million, is being used to replace infrastructure destroyed in the blast, pay for social services for residents, and city staff time, Jackson said.

In addition, the city will seek portions of whatever fines regulators impose on PG&E.

PG&E also faces dozens of lawsuits from victims of the blast.
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Last month, San Bruno city officials called a news conference to lambaste the company for what it saw as a lack of progress in talks meant to reach an agreement on compensation for the city.

Company officials were taken aback by the accusations and the agreement wrapped up within weeks.
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The payment will come out of shareholders' pockets, not ratepayers', PG&E President Chris Johns said in a video statement. http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_20156459 Mercury News is a San Jose paper)

I hope someone keeps a close eye on them. Whether it ACTUALLY comes out of shareholders' pockets, we'll have to see. PG&E isn't exactly, well...

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Subsequent state and federal investigations have painted a picture of PG&E as a company that valued profits far above safety, and exposed a litany of problems -- issues that new management at the company has vowed to reverse.

Among the shortcomings were inaccurate and missing records on the gas pipeline system. Records showed, for example, that the pipeline that exploded on Sept. 9, 2010, was a solid piece of seamless pipe when in fact it was welded. The California Public Utilities Commission is expected to issue a report late Monday on whether the company's poor record-keeping amounted to a violation of law.

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As the first article I posted says, they've pretty obviously acted irresponsibly in MANY ways over time. Wouldn't it be loverly if they determined it DID violate the law? That would be a nice beginning...

In essence: Justice? Maybe a START...
Lesson? HELL NO! PG&E learns how to screw us better, less transparently, each time, then goes right on and hopes for the best. They make so much money, paying lawsuits, etc., is but a pittance, so they don't give a shit.