Residents and Officials Sound Off, CPUC Listens at Pipeline Safety Hearing

Residents and officials from near and far gave commissioners from the CPUC a mouthful today, imploring state regulators to put more pressure on PG&E to make its pipelines safe.

Speakers at the hearing, which was held at the , gave a laundry list of suggestions for how the California Public Utilities Commission could strengthen its pipeline safety rules so that the Sept. 9 gas pipeline explosion and fire in the Crestmoor neighborhood never happens again.

Saying the pipeline explosion could have been prevented with a minimum amount of inspection and maintenance, resident Bill Magoolaghan, whose family was displaced by the fire after their Claremont Drive home was severely damaged, gave one of the most charismatic set of comments during the night.

'Tighter reigns' needed on PG&E operations

Calling the rupture of the result of “PG&E’s negligence” and the CPUC’s “laissez faire attitude toward oversight,” Magoolaghan said making sure homeowners are notified if they live near pipelines and making sure they're aware of how the pipelines are maintained should be made a top priority because homeowners are the most affected.

He also called out the for its inability to provide complete records of its gas pressures and said the CPUC should do more to cap executive salaries of utilities, especially when a disaster such as the explosion in San Bruno happens in the same year.

“Allowing executives to bonus themselves seven times their salary or more in a year when they blew up a neighborhood and killed eight people is ludicrous,” Magoolaghan said, referring partly to PG&E CEO Peter Darbee's salary of $8.4 million in 2010. “The PUC needs to have tighter reigns on executive salaries and have specific requirements that executives have to meet to qualify for a bonus, like maybe not blow up stuff.”

Those comments set the tone for most of the hearing, as speaker after speaker gave their passionate input on how the CPUC could make pipeline safety regulations more efficient throughout the state.

More oversight needed for rate increases

Chris Torres, whose 80-year-old mother died in the explosion and whose siblings were badly burned, said PG&E was pacifying its customers by asking the CPUC for rate increases to make repairs to its pipelines and then delaying the work, as it did in 2007 with Line 132. And he asked the commissioners if they were going to let PG&E continue that practice because “they say everything we want to hear but they don’t do what they’re supposed to do.” 

That sentiment was echoed by officials who also spoke before the CPUC.

Planning Commissioner Perry Peterson said he believes PG&E has a lot of good people working for the company who do their jobs everyday, but that the utility was serving its shareholders with its actions in recent years, including not completing pipeline projects after increasing rates and interpreting on its own federal rules for setting gas pressure limits. 

The CPUC’s job is to make sure PG&E’s actions have proper oversight, he said, and that hasn’t been happening. 

“I think the time has passed for staffs of large utilities to come to work and say, ‘Well, here we have another day of work with 100,000 miles of pipeline and we don’t really know much about it,’” Peterson said. “I think it’s not fair to say that anymore, and I think the rules have to say it.” 

Saying PG&E has the highest rates in the state and the worst safety record of all utilities, Assemblyman Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, also questioned the CPUC’s oversight of PG&E and the way the utility sets its rates. 

Hill called on the commissioners to take a closer look at how the utility uses its existing rates before considering any rate increases to pay for replacing any of its pipes, as PG&E promised after the explosion. 

“Commissioners, I stand here today to say that I want to believe that the PUC is heading in a new direction,” he said, addressing the four commissioners at the hearing—three of which were installed just this year. “But I have concerns that despite these public olive branches, the PUC is still negotiating deals with utilities in private away from public scrutiny.” 

The CPUC is expected to hold two more hearings in May, one in Los Angeles and another in Santa Rosa, to get more input from the public. 

The input will be taken into consideration along with recommendations made by the appointed by the CPUC to investigate the Crestmoor explosion.