PG&E reveals needed repairs
Inspection of equipment found 10,000 problems
While scrambling in recent months to try to avoid setting off another deadly wildfire, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. found nearly 10,000 problems with its power equipment — including some that needed immediate action to be made safe, the utility said Monday.
Thousands of PG&E electrical parts were broken, damaged, burned or corroded, according to documents the embattled company posted on its website. PG&E unearthed the problems between November and the end of May while inspecting about 750,000 power towers, poles and substations in or near highfire threat areas.
Common issues included structural support equipment that was “no good” or out of standard, poles that had become decayed or rotten, and
various parts that were broken or damaged. PG&E said it has already fixed almost everything that posed the greatest risk.
PG&E Corp. CEO Bill Johnson addressed the fireprevention work in a statement Tuesday in which he said the utility’s work was happening “on a scale the industry has never seen before, all to meet the changing nature of the world we live in.”
He asked the public to judge the troubled utility “by the results we show our customers — as well as the way we achieve those results.”
PG&E has sought to ramp up its inspection work as part of a larger effort to prevent its power lines from being responsible for any more deadly wildfires like the ones that killed dozens and destroyed thousands of homes in 2017 and 2018. The utility and its parent company PG&E Corp. are in bankruptcy protection because of their liabilities from wildfires, including November’s Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive blaze of its kind in state history.
When crews inspect PG&E lines, they assign each problem they find a tag indicating the urgency and severity of the issue. About 1,000 problems were assigned the most urgent tag, and all of them have been addressed or are actively being worked on, the company said.
The company listed the results of its power line inspections by city and county. Sonoma, Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties — three of the ninecounty Bay Area’s largest by acreage — had the most power line problems, and the vast majority of them were assigned the lowerpriority “B” tag, meaning the issue needs to resolved within three months.
Of the 9,671 problems listed in the inspection data PG&E released on Monday, 42.7% cannot be repaired and must be replaced. Of those that need to be replaced, 16.6% are in the Bay Area.
Among the other problems PG&E revealed were:
2,511 incidents of broken or damaged equipment
855 pieces of equipment decayed or rotten, most of which needed replacing
36 incidents of corrosion, including one in San Francisco (site not specified)
109 incidents of leaking, mostly transformers 21 nests to be removed 31 instances of woodpecker damage
20 incidents of contamination, mostly in Santa Cruz. These can be cleaned or washed, PG&E says. The utility didn’t say what the sites were contaminated with.
Mark Toney, executive director of The Utility Reform Network consumer group, had mixed feelings about the inspection results. He hoped they were a sign that PG&E “is doing things differently” and really increasing its efforts to make its system safer.
On the other hand, however, he wondered if the extent of the issues shows that PG&E has allowed parts of its system to deteriorate.
“Many of these problems sound like they should have been found out a long time before now,” Toney said. “Yes, it’s good they’re finding them and fixing them now, but they should not have waited this long to find and inspect them. You’re supposed to do it routinely.”
PG&E previously said that, as result of its equipment inspections this year, the company decided to replace 10 out of 11 towers along a stretch of a major Marin County power line in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
It was not clear, based on the documents PG&E posted, what were the exact issues with those towers. But a company spokesman said they suffered from “noticeable material loss and ground erosion.”
Assemblyman Marc Levine, DSan Rafael, said he wasn’t surprised by the results of PG&E’s power line inspections. The company’s equipment problems were one of the main reasons he opposed a bill the Legislature passed last week to protect investorowned electric utilities from future wildfire costs and change how they’re regulated.
“We need to see massive investment in PG&E infrastructure overnight,” said Levine, whose district includes the area in Marin County where PG&E is replacing towers. “Anything less is unforgivable after the deaths that their deficient care of their lines has caused.”
Beyond the enhanced power line inspections, PG&E is also stepping up its treetrimming and installing highdefinition cameras and weather stations to help prevent and monitor wildfires, among other efforts.
All of the work is included in a recent fireprevention plan PG&E — like other investorowned electric companies — was required to submit to state utility regulators. They signed off on PG&E’s plan in May, and U.S. District Judge William Alsup made PG&E’s compliance with the document part of the terms of its probation arising from the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion.
Alsup has also taken note of a recent Wall Street Journal article that said the company knew parts of its electric system were aging and posed a safety risk, even before the Camp Fire. He gave PG&E until July 31 to respond to each paragraph.