Raising new questions about PG&E’s oversight of its natural gas lines, internal company memos released Monday show the utility was alerted nearly 20 years ago that its pipeline record-keeping system was disorganized and out of date.
The lack of documentation “may be costly to PG&E in the future and it may be difficult to defend,” one PG&E records manager wrote.
The disclosure came on the same day the California Public Utilities Commission proposed slapping PG&E with a $26 million fine — the biggest the agency has issued in more than a decade — over the company’s 2008 Rancho Cordova gas-line explosion, which killed one person and injured five others. In a separate development, the utility turned over thousands of pages of documents the commission had demanded detailing 55 years of weld defects in PG&E’s pipes.
The memos from the 1990s, which said PG&E had stopped updating some records on its pipelines, were released by the PUC and are a key part of the agency’s investigation into September’s pipeline explosion in San Bruno, which killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, said the memos’ author, Larry Medina, gave the documents to her office last month. she provided copies to the National Transportation Safety Board and the PUC.
“I was astonished when I saw them,” Speier said. “Here was a very talented, forward-thinking employee at PG&E. he put his finger on one of their weaknesses, alerted them to it and his job was eliminated. It’s just another nail in PG&E’s coffin that suggests that safety was not a high priority.”
‘A low priority’
Medina, now an employee at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, worked at PG&E from 1984 to June 1993. While serving as the utility’s records and information coordinator, he wrote two memos raising concerns that as PG&E had undergone a corporate reorganization, record-keeping functions that were transferred to the utility’s “distribution business unit” had “not been performed or kept current for some time now.”
He specifically cited pipeline files containing information about pressure and strength tests.
In December, NTSB investigators revealed that PG&E records showed the section of pipeline that exploded in San Bruno was seamless pipe, when in fact it was made up of six unusual sections welded together, and contained a longitudinal seam that failed. the information is critical because PG&E uses information about the makeup and history of its pipelines to decide gas pressure levels.
PG&E has been unable to produce records from the 1956 construction job in which the San Bruno pipe — found by investigators to contain more than 150 welding flaws — was first installed, leading to concerns that the same crew might have done similarly shoddy work elsewhere around the Bay Area, putting other neighborhoods at risk.
In a March 1993 memo, Medina noted that PG&E’s “gas supply business unit” and “distribution business unit” had jointly made a decision to no longer update maps known as “pipeline plat sheets,” “due to the extensive backlog and the perceived lack of importance of the data reflected on the drawings.” he noted that the divisions also were failing to generate such maps for new work. among the items that would be included on those maps, he wrote, were high-pressure tests, rights-of-way, land ownership and most notably, construction details.
“There was sufficient funding to keep the work current,” he wrote, “it was just deemed to be a low priority.”
Speier said she didn’t know if PG&E had turned over the records from Medina to NTSB and PUC investigators earlier, or how high the memo went up PG&E’s management chain in the early 1990s. she said that Medina had tried to give the documents to PG&E after the San Bruno explosion, without luck.
“He couldn’t get anyone at PG&E to listen to him,” she said. “Since the blast he attempted to reach out to PG&E and was getting nowhere.”
She described PG&E’s failure to keep its records organized as “malfeasance.”
PG&E spokeswoman Brittany Chord did not respond to specific questions about the memos, except to say she didn’t know if PG&E had sent them earlier to federal and state investigators.
In an interview with this newspaper in February, Chris Johns, president of PG&E’s gas and electric operating unit, said the utility is searching millions of records dating back decades, but when PG&E moved paper records to computers in the 1990s, some were left behind.
“Unfortunately, whether it was human error, or whatever occurred, at times when there were translations of records into the computer system, some mistakes may have been made,” Johns said.
The proposed $26 million fine for the Dec. 24, 2008 Rancho Cordova gas-line blast is based on a recommendation from the commission’s safety division. the fine has to be approved by the five commissioners.
PG&E, which has agreed not to bill its customers for the fine, has admitted violating several pipeline safety regulations, including installing unauthorized pipe that wasn’t sufficiently thick in the area that exploded and failing to test the small residential pipe properly before putting it into service.
Of the thousands of pages of documents PG&E released late Monday, it was not immediately clear how many weld failures and other defects are described in the 55 years of records. One document referenced a number of instances where pipe had to be replaced in the 1970s and 1980s due to PG&E’s concerns about welds.
“If they are coming up with all this stuff that shows years and years of welds going bad, how can they really say, ‘Who would have thunk that this thing would fail?’ ” said PUC attorney Robert Cagen. “The weld failures in the past are something that perhaps should have pointed PG&E to a different course of action.”
Contact Paul Rogers at 408-920-5 045.
