Gerry Shih at the Bay Citizen has another important story on the San Bruno gas pipeline disaster, following up on their earlier report about residents complaining of a gas leak that PG&E knew about but was unable to fix. Their newest story shows that PG&E knew the pipeline had a very high risk of failure but was not planning to replace it until 2013 or 2014:
As early as 2007, Pacific Gas & Electric Company officials considered a portion of the gas main that ruptured and triggered the deadly San Bruno blaze on Thursday to be at "unacceptably" high risk for failure, according to documents obtained by The Bay Citizen.
The documents raise new questions about the extent of PG&E's responsibility for the biggest disaster in the utility's 105-year history in California.
The utility company had planned to repair by 2013 a 7,481-foot long section of pipe, which it deemed-based on internal risk assessments made in 2007 - one of PG&E's "top 100 highest risk line sections."
The obvious question is "why 2013?" If the pipeline was so dangerous - among the top 7% most dangerous pipelines in the nation, according to the AP - then you'd think PG&E would have moved more quickly to replace it.
But that wasn't done. Apparently, PG&E had other priorities, which included spending $46 million in a failed effort to limit local democracy and protect their monopoly with Proposition 16.
Others are asking the same question, including Christine Pelosi:
These are funds that could have been used to repair what the utility's own survey said was a high risk pipeline on the SF peninsula. So why make the decision for politics not pipelines? If the spending decisions were not related, why not? At the very least, PG&E should have a moratorium on political spending until they compensate the San Bruno victims and fix the pipelines.
"Ratepayer say on utility pay" is a good start, but this tragedy should force us to ask an even more fundamental question: Wouldn't we be better off with PG&E under public ownership?
We keep hearing from the right, and from even neoliberal Democrats, that the private sector can do things better than the public sector, and so we should turn over things currently handled by government to the private sector.
Yet what we see in PG&E's case is that they would rather protect their monopoly rather than provide safe and efficient service. $46 million would have bought a lot of new pipeline and paid the training and labor costs of the technicians who would install it. This is typical of the private sector, where capturing rents and using their wealth to fend off competition is preferred to innovation and providing quality services.
The public sector can always do a better job providing for these core services, and indeed many municipalities, such as Seattle, have publicly owned electric and gas utilities that haven't had these problems.
But the private sector and their neoliberal allies in both parties long ago learned that the income streams currently going to public services - and the competition to corporate wealth and power posed by those services - can be undermined if government is defunded. Without proper funds, government services quickly deteriorate in quality, and the public becomes susceptible to an argument that the private sector can do things better. As more money and services are then handed over to the private sector, the public sector enters a downward spiral, with worse service quality that fuels calls for further cuts and privatization, causing further service problems and reinforcing the loop.
This tragedy isn't just the result of a leak in a gas line, or of bad practices at PG&E - but of the entire concept of letting the private sector own and operate the basic infrastructure and services of a modern society. It's time we addressed that root cause, to ensure this tragedy doesn't happen again. |
