PG&E conduct hindered probe, say San Bruno investigators
Federal investigators complained that secret meddling, arrogance and “shady” conduct on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. hindered their probe into the deadly San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, according to new court filings that shed light on prosecutors’ decision to seek a criminal obstruction-of-justice case against the company.
“PG&E really stood out as a company that was not forthcoming and lacked cooperation,” Ravi Chhatre, lead investigator in the San Bruno case for the National Transportation Safety Board, told a team of federal investigators and prosecutors last year, the documents show.
Federal prosecutors interviewed Chhatre in July 2014 as part of their investigation after the company had already been indicted on pipelinesafety charges in connection with the blast, which killed eight people and leveled 38 homes.
Later that month, a grand jury amended the indictment to add more pipeline-safety counts and one count of obstructing the safety board’s
investigation into the September 2010 explosion.
If convicted of all charges, PG&E could be fined more than $1 billion. The company has pleaded not guilty. None of its current or former executives is accused of a crime.
Testing pipelines
The obstruction charge accuses PG&E of misleading investigators by disowning a 2008 document that outlined a scheme for avoiding costly pipeline inspections after gas-pressure surges, in apparent defiance of federal law. PG&E insisted to investigators that the policy document was only a draft.
Last week, the utility asked U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson to throw out the case — and, in a strange twist, accompanied its court filing with with summaries of the federal interviews with Chhatre and other National Transportation Safety Board investigators who criticized the company’s conduct during the San Bruno probe.
PG&E argued to the judge that the interviews showed that the safety board didn’t care about the 2008 document during its probe. As a result, its attorneys said, PG&E wasn’t obstructing anything when it denied it had implemented the inspection policy.
Legal arguments aside, the interviews show that the relationship between PG&E and federal investigators during the probe was hostile from the start.
Chhatre complained that PG&E employees were “giggling, laughing and were sarcastic” during interviews he conducted four months after the explosion, according to a summary prepared by Lisa Glazzy, an investigator with the U.S. Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General.
“Chhatre felt as if they were mocking him,” Glazzy wrote. “PG&E’s demeanor was shocking and offensive to Chhatre, and it really stood out to him.”
‘Toxic atmosphere’
Another safety board investigator, Matt Nicholson, told the prosecution team that PG&E had adopted a defensive, condescending and sarcastic attitude, and that the company was responsible for creating a “toxic atmosphere” around the probe.
“He felt as though the PG&E attorneys were trying to stop things, and the NTSB was not getting real information from them,” an investigator with the San Mateo County district attorney’s office, Rich Maher, wrote after the team interviewed Nicholson in November 2014.
Nicholson said “that in other investigations conducted by the NTSB the involved parties have been tough, but in this case there appeared to be a problem with the culture at PG&E,” Maher wrote.
In response to the accusations, PG&E released a statement Friday saying it does not believe its employees intentionally violated federal law, and that “even where mistakes were made, employees were acting in good faith.” It did not address the investigators’ criticisms directly.
Quizzing retiree
Relations between PG&E and the investigators grew so bad that Chhatre demanded that PG&E replace the company’s liaison to the safety board probe.
He pushed for the ouster after the liaison, Robert Fassett, and a PG&E attorney secretly interviewed a retired worker from the crew that installed the failed section of the San Bruno pipeline in 1956, Glazzy wrote. Safety board investigators had yet to talk to the 80-year-old man about how PG&E performed the work and who had done the welding that eventually failed.
Fassett explained that he was only seeking to “vet a potential witness as relevant before bringing the witness into the NTSB,” Nicholson recounted.
Chhatre, however, said the interview was a breach of PG&E’s agreement with the federal investigators not to conduct its own interviews without safety board officials being there. “It was the second or third time PG&E was not forthcoming with information,” Chhatre said, according to the summary.
Chhatre had other issues with PG&E. He called the company’s disavowal of the 2008 pipelinetesting document “shady” and said PG&E had taken too long to disclose a 1988 leak report showing that the firm had known the San Bruno pipeline had a history of problem welds.
“Chhatre felt they were not being forthcoming about providing the leak report,” Glazzy said in her summary. “It should have been provided in the first few months.”
Instead, PG&E did not hand it over until mid-2011, and even then only after what Nicholson called an “ugly” exchange with a state Public Utilities Commission engineer.
The engineer, Sunil Shori, told PG&E executive Brian Dauby on a conference call that he wanted to retrieve the report that day from the company’s Walnut Creek records center, Chhatre recalled.
“Nope, you cannot have them today. You’ll have to come tomorrow to get them,” Dauby said, according to Chhatre. The PG&E official told Shori he was welcome to come that day to the Walnut Creek center, “but you won’t get in.”
“How can you take that from them?” Chhatre recalled asking Shori.
He said the state engineer had replied that he had “no authority or power over PG&E” and said he was “afraid he would not get the support from his own managers.”
‘Litany of failures’ cited
The safety board concluded in August 2011 that PG&E was to blame for the San Bruno explosion. Its chairwoman said a “litany of failures” by the company had led to the disaster.
San Bruno City Manager Connie Jackson, the city’s official representative to the safety board probe, said she was not surprised that the federal investigators had complained about PG&E to prosecutors after completing their work.
“I saw the same thing — we were party to the same investigation and saw the same behavior and attitude by PG&E,” Jackson said. “It was consistently a condescending and defensive attitude that started right out of the gate.”
She added, “The process was made more complicated by PG&E’s dismissive and disrespectful attitude. It truly is appalling.”