Posted on 12/16/2018 8:09:41 AM PST by Libloather
Regulators on Friday accused one of California’s largest utilities of falsifying safety documents for natural gas pipelines for years following its criminal conviction and multimillion-dollar fine for a pipeline explosion that killed eight people near San Francisco.
The California Public Utilities Commission said an investigation by its safety and enforcement division found Pacific Gas & Electric Co. lacked enough employees to fulfill requests to find and mark natural gas pipelines.
Because of the staff shortage, PG&E pressured supervisors and locators to complete the work, leading staff to falsify data from 2012 to 2017, regulators said. The company “had common knowledge among its supervisors that locators falsified data,” the commission said.
(Excerpt) Read more at ksby.com ...
I think All Oil , Gas and everything made from them should be Banned in California,that will fix them
Well, good. I certainly hope they stick it to the rate-payers. How else wll PG&E learn?
Find them???? Who the hell put them where they are in the first place???
The CPUC is in on the whitewash.
There should be public records of where every one of those lines is & those records should be in the hands of the authorities, along with the company.
I smell a rat.
How about some fool in the County/City/State thought everything should be put on micro-fiche & tossed those old maps?????
The State of California cannot continue blaming everything on P G & E.
> I think All Oil , Gas and everything made from them should be Banned in California,that will fix them <
I think California should just nationalize all those industries. After all, that worked perfectly for socialist Venezuela. So it should also work for socialist California.
The utilities practically are state owned as a heavily regulated monopoly.
This is in preparation for the left’s push to nationalize all utilities everywhere including fuel distribution. Because everyone knows that government workers do the very best and most efficient job delivering important services and products to the public.
Falsifying documents is ok see Mueller and company.
PG&E built out the natural gas systems in the 1950’s and 60’s with extreme speed, to keep up with and get ahead of the economic and population growth of the time, as well as the industrial fuels conversion from coal and bunker oil to nat gas.
That is besides the old municipal gas systems it had taken over from the 1910’s in some cases.
There were lots of corners cut in those days. And the company was not good about retaining records in those days either. The sins of past generations.
These things are public records, and this has been so by law for over 50 years.
But the infrastructure in question is in large part older than that.
Its certainly true that the inherent liability risk, and political risk, for an energy utility in CA is extreme.
Publicly owned utilities, as in LA’s LADWP or Sacramento’s SMUD, are well shielded from these risks.
On the other hand the service territories PG&E and So Cal Ed are burdened with due to “obligation to serve” parts of their state charters are much more resource-intensive to service than these municipal utilities.
What they mean by “find them” is hooking up a Pipehorn, Vivax, or RDX locator to put a signal on the pipe or tracer wire so it can be marked out.
That’s providing if on steel pipe the bonding cables are intact wherever there is a Dresser fitting, or on the anodes. On plastic, you have to deal with tracer wire that may have been damaged, or the lead removed by some bonehead property owner who thinks it’s just a useless wire sticking up out of the ground.
There is also old pipe in the ground that was installed back in the days before accurate records keeping were required. That means hand drawn maps drawn by people who are no longer alive and maps that no longer match current road alignments.
So yeah they have to sometimes “find them”.
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>> “Regulators accuse California utility PG&E of falsifying (safety) records on natural gas pipelines” <<
I can attest that this is the direct opposite of what is happening!
Records of malfunctions are entered automatically by multiple sensors.
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This is major fake news, and major larceny against the stockholders of PG&E.
PG&E had absolutely nothing to do with the San Bruno explosion. It was caused by damage done to the pipe by SF water and Power (City owned agency) when repairing a leak on their water main, long before the explosion.
PG&E’s board is populated with wealthy socialists that don’t mind screwing investors at all. If they can run the private utility broke, then it can be replaced by a socialist-friendly government agency.
I’m sure you endorse this ‘solution’ judging by your socialist-leaning posting history.
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>> “The State of California cannot continue blaming everything on P G & E” <<
Sure they can!
PG&E’s board doesn’t mind, they don’t even have a dog in the fight.
Methinks your sarcasm detector needs to be re-calibrated.
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Your “Truth Detector” is off-line.
Schedule service soon!
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