PG&E isn’t responsible for the litigious society we now live in ... but couldn’t they have said something?

The California Public Utilities Commission last week announced it was fining the Pacific Gas & Electric Company $1 million for an explosion that destroyed a Yuba City home and injured two people (it was a miracle they weren’t killed).

In that manner, the CPUC deals with a utility company’s practices relating to infrastructure. We wish the commission would also exhort the speedy relay of pertinent information to neighborhoods and communities where accidents occur.

The CPUC said it found that there was a faulty installation of a pipeline that contributed to the explosion. The homeowner was blown out of the home, in that explosion, but walked back in to carry out his girlfriend who had been in the shower stall at the time.

Not long after the explosion PG&E replaced a mile’s worth of pipe along Bogue Road and South George Washington Boulevard.

Our beef with the utility, to begin with, was a lack of communication. We wanted to know, whether it was the utility company’s fault or not, that there weren’t other similar situations and that that particular neighborhood was now safe. It was apparent after a couple months that it wasn’t just PG&E, but the commission as well ...

“Hey! Are we all safe here?” we would call and ask. “No comment at this time,” they’d say.

It seemed evident there was a problem with the gas line ... they replaced it soon after the explosion. But there was no communication from the utility about the safety of the situation. The company was evidently fearful of inadvertently claiming liability by explaining they’d mitigated danger by replacing faulty pipeline.

Customers went more than a year without an explanation about the explosion that blew a home in their neighborhood apart and without specific assurances that the neighborhood was now safe.

PG&E is not to blame for the litigious society we now live in. But it just seems some sort of communication could have been delivered somehow.

As of now, we still don’t have it straight from the horse’s mouth that the sort of mislaid pipe at fault in that catastrophe has been changed out everywhere it occurs. Only that they “continue to work to have the safest delivery system in the country.”

Not much in that message ... but, then, they’ve still got legal issues to deal with.