Shades of Erin Brockovich.
Any fine will be paid by the customers, not the company.
A company I worked for set up the quality manager for what could have been criminal charges. Then, when they were discovered they sacrificed him. He didn’t go to jail, but he could have. Yes, he did what the accused him of, but his boss led him to believe if he didn’t he’d be fired.
That was the most tense place I ever worked. I was slippery enough to stay one step ahead of them. But I lived in fear that they’d one day tell me to do something similar and I’d have to walk out the door. Finally, the killed the company by taking an insane risk and 80% of the employees (all innocent) were laid off. The top guys all got golden parachutes. On the good side, the experience provided me with enough real life examples to get my MBA.
We own a home in Carmel-by-the-Sea. PG&E is in the process of replacing most of the gas distribution piping there including the replacement of the service lines from the mains to the homes. They wanted to move our gas meter because it was under a kitchen window and unless we had been there to protest, they would have put it in a place that would have blocked fire egress (but it would not have been under a window). They managed to piss off half the neighborhood with their high-handed decision making, and their seeming inability to communicate with absentee homeowners. We had called both the city and PG&E in advance of this work, left contact info, and spoke with the people directly involved with the construction. We found a note under a rock on a pile of dirt in our yard asking us to call. They made a neighbor spend $5,000 to move their electrical service so that it was more than 3 ft from the meter. Both gas and electric services are from PG&E and the homes have been there since 1940, so you have to ask yourself, if all of these installations present a risk, where have they been all these years? A few blocks away, they managed to blow up a home by not managing the cutoff and reconnection of the gas to it. Luckily, no one was injured, but the roof of the house that blew up landed on the roof of the house next door. In speaking with the contractor, it is clear that all of this is in response to San Bruno.
What did PG&E know and when did they know it?
Put that corporation in prison! It can occupy the cell next to Enron.