Sept. 9 Explosion: One Year Later, a City Still Recovers

Crestmoor residents have had a conflicted relationship with PG&E in the year since the explosion.

The company has gone to great lengths to appear penitent over the damage it wrought. It took out an  in major Northern California newspapers apologizing for the disaster and promising to do better in the future. "We are sorry for the San Bruno accident and we are working to make our operations safer and stronger," it read.

PG&E established the Rebuild San Bruno Fund, which budgeted up to $100 million for the victims of the explosion and instituted a program in which the company would buy distressed Crestmoor properties from homeowners looking to sell and move on with their lives.

CEO Peter Darbee , noting that it had been "a challenging year." Darbee's resignation paved the way for PG&E to appoint —the first chief to be hired from outside the company's ranks in its century-long history.

Despite such actions, there's a feeling that PG&E is also doing whatever it can to skirt full responsibility. More than 300 claims against the company are winding their way though the courts. When a July filing implied that a  was a factor in the explosion, many took it to mean that the utility at least partially blamed San Bruno residents for what happened.

"We want it to be crystal clear that no one at PG&E would suggest that the plaintiffs or residents of San Bruno impacted by this accident are somehow at fault for the tragedy," PG&E .

Crestmoor resident Bill Magoolahan, whose home was destroyed in the fire, rated the company a "five out of 10 on the trustworthy scale."

San Mateo Assemblyman Jerry Hill accused PG&E of trying to have it both ways. "PG&E officials need to stop talking out of both sides of their mouths and treat the victims of this tragedy with the respect they deserve,” he said.

Hill recently  to reduce the hazards associated with such equipment. His bill would require pipelines in highly populated areas to contain automatic shutoff valves, prevent gas companies from recovering any fines or penalties from ratepayers, mandate that regulators track PG&E's spending on safety projects and force the utility to annually review its emergency response plans with local fire departments.

In March, facing a mandate to prove that the rest of its pipelines are safe, hundreds of PG&E employees combed through 100,000 crates of documents relating to the history of the pipelines. Despite the undertaking, key documents detailing the history of the line that ran under Crestmoor .

See more of this story at the Huffington Post.