Years of PG&E Pipeline Records May Be Gone

When Larry Medina read that PG&E employees could not find vital documents related to the San Bruno pipeline explosion, he tried in vain to reach his former colleagues. The former records manager knew exactly where to find the critical data.

Medina would later learn that years of meticulously kept records had been certainly lost and probably trashed.

Medina describes his unsuccessful efforts to help the company find the critical information in a transcribed interview released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board with .

Hired to manage the records and information system for gas transmission and storage records, Medina left in 1993 during a reorganization and established his own firm. Today he manages records and information systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In the days after a gas-fueled fireball coursed through a San Bruno neighborhood, a distraught Medina read news reports in which PG&E officials said they could not locate the necessary information.

"This is after they had gone through all the inspection at the Cow Palace where there were these pallets and pallets of records (and) the great theater of the hundreds of employees going there to look at things -- they said, well, we are convinced that we cannot find the information and that it probably never existed.”

Outraged, Medina related his experience to San Mateo Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier.

"My blood boiled when I heard that because I knew it existed," he said. "I was being paid for 10 years to manage it.”

In the interview, Medina details how he kept triplicate copies of paper reports in three respective locations and up to four copies of microfilm renderings in humidity-controlled vaults. He developed a computerized database in 1986 beginning with a complete inventory.

He says he would have kept microfilmed impressions of a pipeline like 132 that had been crafted from several short lengths.

“Line 132, for instance, would have had multiple sheets, depicting various segments of the pipeline and the conditions of that,” he says. “And those were kept up-to-date.”

In October he began calling his former co-worker, engineer-turned vice president Kirk Johnson. Johnson never called back. He then turned to pipeline operations manager Luano Nomellini, who finally returned Medina’s call in December.

“I told him that I had tried to call Kirk and that I wanted to share some information with him about the system that we managed, and asked why, if we had this thing filed three different ways in three different locations,” that the records could not be found.

"What happened to all of that stuff?” he asked Nomellini.

He says Nomellini answered that “some probably just got boxed and sent to the records center, and I don't know how accurately it was labeled, and the rest of it, if they couldn't identify what it was, it probably just got s**t-canned.”

Medina answered, “I'm sorry, say that again? Probably what?”

Nomellini: “Probably got s**t-canned.”

Medina: “Okay.”

Nomellini: “A little colloquialism.”

Nomellini tells Medina he will ask around to find what happened to the records. Medina never heard from him again.

If the records remained where he left them on the 10th floor of 123 Mission St. in San Francisco, "I could walk in that room, turn a cabinet around, stick my hand out and touch the line 132 pipeline files," he tells the interviewers.

The utility was not only required to maintain records that met federal regulations. Those who oversee them must be prepared to make them available for inspection at any time, he explains in the interview.

“So every time they wanted to cut our budget, I would press the 'play' button on the side of my neck and state that," he says, "to remind people that we had an obligation to maintain drawings of all facilities that were in operation that accurately depicted the condition.”