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February 2, 2012 at 12:42 pm By Roz Potter
From an Associated Press article found in many newspapers including the Herald Tribune, Link
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. admitted Wednesday that its safety officials never checked for gas leaks in a much broader swath of California than the company previously disclosed following the deadly San Bruno pipeline explosion.
PG&E originally told the California Public Utilities Commission that the utility misplaced 16 maps of its pipelines last year, so as a result never did leak surveys in any of those locations, in violation of state regulations. The commission said last week it would fine PG&E $16.8 million in response.
But on Wednesday, the company admitted it actually hadn’t checked for pipeline leaks in a much larger geographic region detailed in 46 additional maps stretching from Fresno to Yolo counties, and including parts of the San Francisco Bay area.
PG&E spokesman Brian Swanson said the company had since surveyed the lines and found five leaks on 9.61 miles of gas distribution lines “associated” with the maps. A leak in the city of Napa was considered to be of the most severe kind, requiring immediate repair, Swanson said. (emphasis added)
Two other leaks were located in unincorporated Napa County, another was found in unincorporated area if Solano County and a fifth was in Elk Grove. (emphasis added)
Commission spokeswoman Terrie Prosper didn’t immediately say what actions the commission planned to take, or whether the fine would increase with the revelation of a wider problem.
PG&E simultaneously announced the company intends to appeal the fine.
“We believe the fine is excessive because we did the right thing _ by promptly self-reporting what we’d found to assure we placed public safety first,” Nick Stavropoulos, executive vice president of gas operations, said in a statement Wednesday. “We congratulated the employees who identified the missing information and took immediate corrective action.”
The Sept. 9, 2010, blast on PG&E’s transmission line in San Bruno killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes.
PG&E could face additional, larger penalties in a separate probe by the commission into whether the company should be fined for the San Bruno blast.
Consumer advocates and a state lawmaker urged Commission President Michael Peevey on Wednesday to recuse himself from the probe to remove the appearance of impropriety.
Assemblyman Jerry Hill said Gov. Jerry Brown should remove Peevey from the investigation because federal safety investigators found myriad safety lapses occurred since he has led the commission since 2003.
“Under the president’s stewardship over the past decade, the commission failed to ensure that PG&E’s gas distribution system was safe,” said Hill, a Democrat who represents San Bruno. “That’s why I find it offensive that someone so responsible for the culture implicated in the San Bruno disaster has taken it upon himself to lead the direction of this penalty proceeding.”
The commission said any settlement with PG&E will require a vote of the five-member panel.
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Follow Garance Burke at http://www.twitter.com/garanceburke
Posted in Infrastructure Failure, Public Safety | No Comments »
December 27, 2011 at 9:09 pm By Roz Potter
Drastic cuts to federal, state and municipal budgets mean fewer law enforcement personnel at the very time that reductions to social programs and safety nets will hit individuals and families already stressed by unemployment, lack of health insurance, home foreclosure, and higher costs for basic necessities. A perfect set-up for crime.
Through lecture, discussion and exercises, this beginning level workshop will introduce you to crime prevention concepts and practices that can help you prevent or evade assaults, robbery, identity theft and burglary. Learn information and methods that can help you:
- evaluate and alter personal and environmental factors that can place you at higher risk
- recognize criminal thinking, strategies and methods
- evade predator ploys
- use situational awareness
- recognize and act on your intuition
Taught by law enforcement and security guest lecturer, along with Roz Potter, RN, MA, CIC. $75 ($15 discount for prior workshop participants and seniors) Scholarships available.
Posted in Identity Theft, Personal safety, Personal security, Public Safety | No Comments »
October 21, 2011 at 12:57 am By Roz Potter
From the SF Chronicle: Link
SAN BRUNO –
State regulators have uncovered evidence that suggests Pacific Gas and Electric Co. installed “salvaged or junked transmission pipe” on its natural-gas system in the 1940s and ’50s, raising fears that a problem like the one that caused the San Bruno disaster could be lurking undetected, officials said in a regulatory filing Wednesday.
The California Public Utilities Commission’s investigation of PG&E’s record-keeping problems before the September 2010 pipeline explosion in San Bruno that killed eight people has uncovered “documents that appear to demonstrate PG&E’s historic reuse of salvaged or junked transmission pipe,” according to the filing by commission attorney Robert Cagen.
“These documents clearly raise serious safety concerns,” Cagen wrote.
Evidence under wraps
His filing did not specify which of the 90,000 documents that PG&E has given to commission investigators indicated the use of salvaged transmission pipe. Cagen wrote that investigators want to release the documents, but that PG&E has made a blanket assertion of confidentiality for much of what it has handed to the state.
***
Cagen suggested in his filing that regulators have found other “documents demonstrating that PG&E has accepted known poor and marginal welds, and then placed pipes with these poor or marginal welds into service” on the Peninsula pipeline, known as Line 132.
“Indeed, the NTSB determined that PG&E was aware as early as 1948 that it had placed transmission pipes into service on Line 132 with poor welds in them,” Cagen wrote.
He said he is seeking a “blanket rule favoring disclosure” of PG&E’s documents to “facilitate faster sharing of information in order to meet immediate public safety concerns.”
Posted in Community Preparedness, Fire Safety, Infrastructure Failure, Public Safety | No Comments »
October 6, 2011 at 11:33 pm By Roz Potter
From S.F. Gate, Link
Excerpts:
California regulators warned Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on Thursday to stick to the letter of an agreement with the state on pressure testing its natural-gas lines to ensure there are no time bombs like the San Bruno transmission pipe that exploded last year.
***
At issue is PG&E’s deal with the California Public Utilities Commission to perform a two-part “spike” test using high-pressure water on urban transmission lines that have never been tested for weak welds that could fail and cause explosions. That involves doing an eight-hour hydro test and a short, higher-pressure spike test.
Commission staffers were critical of PG&E after the company used a less-rigorous test this summer at a compressor station near Needles (San Bernardino County) without telling the state in advance. PG&E had been forced to cut pressure at the station because of an unintended gas spike earlier this year.
PG&E said a spike hydro test could endanger the station. On Thursday, the commission gave the company permission to restore full pressure based on the results of the less rigorous test, though members were clearly upset over how PG&E had handled the matter.
“Any further testing must conform to our rules,” commission member Mark Ferron said, speaking directly to PG&E officials at a meeting in Los Angeles. “To be clear: We mean it.”
Commissioner Timothy Alan Simon added, “I want to make clear, going forward, we expect PG&E to understand compliance requirements.”
However, PG&E acknowledged in a Sept. 27 letter to the head of the commission’s safety division that the company had conducted seven additional non-spike tests over the summer along a total of 7 miles of transmission pipeline running from the Needles station to Milpitas.
***
Richard Kuprewicz, a pipeline safety consultant who is reviewing PG&E compliance for the watchdog group The Utility Reform Network, said the company could avoid safety problems by conducting full spike tests in shorter segments.
“It looks like they are trying to avoid a hydro-test failure,” Kuprewicz said. “That is not the idea – the idea is to perform a proper test and if you do get a series of failures, then you need to go right into pipe replacement.”
He added, “The last thing you want to do is a poor hydro test and create the illusion that it is an adequate test.”
Posted in Infrastructure Failure, Public Safety | No Comments »
October 1, 2011 at 7:11 pm By Roz Potter
From The Mainichi Daily News: Link
Excerpts:
The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology announced on Sept. 30 that it had detected highly-toxic plutonium apparently from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power plant in soil at six locations including Iitate village in Fukushima Prefecture.
It is the first discovery of the highly-toxic radioactive substance outside the nuclear plant since the outbreak of the disaster in mid-March. The ministry also said radioactive strontium was detected in a wide swath of Fukushima Prefecture within a radius of 80 kilometers from the troubled nuclear power plant, underscoring the fact that the nuclear crisis has been affecting wide areas.
The ministry conducted inspections on soil at 100 locations within a radius of 80 kilometers from the crippled nuclear power plant in June and July. Plutonium-238, believed to have come from the crippled nuclear plant, was detected in six locations including Iitate, Futaba and Namie. Plutonium-239 and -240 were also detected in many locations, but the ministry said it was not clear whether they were directly linked to the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
According to the ministry, the levels of radiation in the plutonium detected fall below the levels of radiation in plutonium believed to have come from atmospheric nuclear tests conducted in the past. But because very little plutonium-238 had been detected before the outbreak of the nuclear crisis, the ministry concluded that it had come from the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
***
Meanwhile, the ministry said it had detected radioactive strontium-89 in nearly half of the locations inspected, including Shirakawa, about 79 kilometers from the nuclear plant. Because the half life of strontium-89 is only about 50 days, the ministry concluded that all the findings of the radioactive substance were linked to the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Namie registered the highest level of radiation, with 22,000 becquerels per one square meter of soil. Noting differences in distribution between the plutonium and radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the ministry plans to carry out more inspections because strontium can easily builds up in bones.
Posted in Nuclear power disaster, Public Safety, Radiation health risks, natural disasters | No Comments »
September 14, 2011 at 8:32 pm By Roz Potter
From the Mainichi Daily News, Link
As a radiation metrology and nuclear safety expert at Kyoto University’s Research Reactor Institute, Hiroaki Koide has been critical of how the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) have handled the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant. Below, he shares what he thinks may happen in the coming weeks, months and years.
The nuclear disaster is ongoing. Immediately after the crisis first began to unfold, I thought that we’d see a definitive outcome within a week. However, with radioactive materials yet to be contained, we’ve remained in the unsettling state of not knowing how things are going to turn out.
Without accurate information about what’s happening inside the reactors, there’s a need to consider various scenarios. At present, I believe that there is a possibility that massive amounts of radioactive materials will be released into the environment again.
At the No. 1 reactor, there’s a chance that melted fuel has burned through the bottom of the pressure vessel, the containment vessel and the floor of the reactor building, and has sunk into the ground. From there, radioactive materials may be seeping into the ocean and groundwater.
The use of water to cool down the reactors immediately after the crisis first began resulted in 110,000 cubic meters of radiation-tainted water. Some of that water is probably leaking through the cracks in the concrete reactor buildings produced by the March 11 quake. Contaminated water was found flowing through cracks near an intake canal, but I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I believe that contaminated water is still leaking underground, where we can’t see it. Because of this, I believe immediate action must be taken to build underground water barriers that would close off the nuclear power plant to the outside world and prevent radioactive materials from spreading. The important thing is to stop any further diffusion of radioactive materials.
The government and plant operator TEPCO are trumpeting the operation of the circulation cooling system, as if it marks a successful resolution to the disaster. However, radiation continues to leak from the reactors. The longer the circulation cooling system keeps running, the more radioactive waste it will accumulate. It isn’t really leading us in the direction we need to go.
Posted in Nuclear power disaster, Public Safety, Radiation health risks | 2 Comments »
September 5, 2011 at 3:57 pm By Roz Potter
From the San Jose Mercury News, two articles: Link and Link.
Excerpt from first link known unsafe pipe:
The explosion and fire that ripped through a Cupertino home this week was caused by a crack in a PG&E gas line made of a material whose regular failures have been the subject of at least two federal safety advisories, numerous lawsuits and accidents across the nation dating back at least a decade.
Not only had PG&E been warned of the dangers of the degrading plastic by federal regulators since 2002, several of the utility’s own employees have been sounding the alarm for years.
PG&E officials confirmed Friday that the leaking 2-inch distribution line that triggered Wednesday’s fire was made of a type of pipe called Aldyl-A, manufactured in the early 1970s by DuPont — and there are 1,231 miles of the same type of pipe in PG&E’s system running to homes across Northern California.
The revelation added a new chapter to PG&E’s woes nearly a year after the deadly rupture of one of its steel gas transmission lines in San Bruno, killing eight people and destroying 38 homes.
PG&E officials said Friday they will immediately begin reviewing their gas lines made of the infamous Aldyl-A piping built before 1973.
Excerpt from second link:
A day after federal investigators chastised PG&E for “a “litany of failures” in last year’s San Bruno blast, a loud explosion blew away a Cupertino home’s garage door, and several underground gas pipes in the area were found leaking, authorities said Thursday.
Pacific Gas & Electric crews found seven leaks in the 2-inch pipes that distribute gas to homes in the area near the explosion. But investigators are still unsure exactly what caused Wednesday’s blast.
PG&E has more than 42,000 miles of the distribution pipes running beneath properties in the Bay Area and beyond — and a similar explosion killed a man inside his Sacramento-area home three years ago.
The resident of the Cupertino townhome near the Homestead Square Shopping Center had left the home 15 minutes before the explosion, which badly damaged the residence. No injuries were reported, and firefighters said they saved a pet dog hiding under a bed inside.
Posted in Infrastructure Failure, Public Safety | No Comments »
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