It sucks that they lost maps of 0.038% of their system, but come on. PG&E actually does a better job of keeping up with this stuff than the industry as a whole. Until the El Paso explosion outside Roswell and PG&E's San Bruno problem, the industry was pretty much unregulated and under intense management pressure to cut costs. So if the upside of cursory to non-existent inspection is promotion and raises and the downside is some system outages when the lines fail, you don't do a good job of inspecting.
Every one of these companies have double-super-secret evaluations of the trade off between operating safely and killing a few citizens. They must not put too high a price on the population because they keep cutting staff and incentivising people to falsify inspection records.
Yeah, sucks they lost maps, but an underlying issue is they are depending on maps alone to tell them they have pipelines? Surely they have these lines in another data set, or in a GIS. They can even check with the state regulator database to pull out all license files on their existing lines.
My brief experience with PG&E they do not do a very good job of maintaining pipeline records. Sure, all companies have a risk matrix, on the x-axis scale it may even be number civilian deaths, but I would have a hard time believing PG&E would deem acceptable a level or number like an entire city block, at least I hope not.
I agree, no doubt they were under pressure to reduce operating costs, we all are everyday, but as a professional in integrity, part of our job is to try to educate bean counters why certain integrity tasks cannot be dropped and potential consequences of having this type of mindset.
Just ask Ford about the Pinto. They made that EXACT calculation and figured (incorrectly) that a few deaths out weighed the cost savings of relocating the gas tank
They didn't lose the maps, they simply didn't use the maps that they had. Otherwise, there's no way they could have regenerated the maps and completed the line survey in only 10 days,
And who the hell is not "chasing the almighty dollar"? People within businesses make business decisions in order to optimize return to investors. Often these decisions are short sighted and sometimes they are flat dumb, but that is true of any entity with a free will.
Folks at PG&E took a series of actions that resulted in 3/100ths of one percent of their system not being included in their inspection program. It was much more likely that a clerical employee skipped a few lines while transcribing a list than it was some manager telling the clerical worker that 99.97% of the map names was all he had to input. Management might be at fault in not providing adequate manpower to the task, but it might have just been a human mistake.
The socialist mantra of "corporate greed" has just gotten tired with over use.
Rant all you want, but the bottom line is that it's as you said, people "took a series of actions" that got to missing the plats.
HOWEVER, then followed 20 yrs of actions, or inactions, wherein their corporate greed has resulted in generations of employees who DO NOT have safety as job ONE, and over 20 yrs, no one has wondered who was checking all those pipelines. If there had been company emphasis on safety, there would have been reviews of the testing plans every time something changed, like comparing the set of plats to the actual service area.
This form of intentional presumption that everything is was OK, so it's still OK, is what led to the two shuttle disasters, but it's coupled with a management that stifles dissent and employee initiative that might have caught the error no more than 15 yrs ago.
This sort of environment is ENDEMIC. Few companies truly adhere to written company policies on safety, or even proper business practice, because it's too expensive to implement.
As I have stated before, it is only when lives are lost in spectacular way that change in the US truly begins.
I only hope and pray that a US Senator or Congressman can be swept away in the next big natural gas conflagration.
I think that it is important to note that in the PG&E San Bruno accident, the gas piping was operating at a pressure that was the maximum allowed for that material in the NEW condition. The fact that the piping system included a fifty year old poorly welded section of uninspected pipe was not important to the MBAs.
The operating pressure had slowly increased over time.....
Run it 'till it breaks.....!!! The new MBA credo !!
Take your management bonuses and blame an underling.
Yea OK missing maps - but the following also scares me -
“10 % of those traced gas leaks to faulty welds or materials” - source San Francisco Chronicle
Faulty welds? - no sign off by a welding inspector – I would have assumed that all welds were NDT inspected – or do they just do random.
Materials? - wrong grade?, rubber perhaps?
Apply that to 40,000 some odd miles of gas pipe and you have a potential bigger problem waiting to happen.
