Surprise: PG&E Putting Profit Before Safety. The San Bruno Explosion Could Have Been Avoided

This is what "compromise" leads to. San Bruno CA

It’s the same old story. It comes to light after a Northern California neighborhood is destroyed and people are blown to bits, that the method of testing damaged, weakened and corroded gas pipelines is considerably flawed. The method, known as “direct assessment” which basically involves running an electric current through the pipeline is “far from foolproof” according to people familiar with the method.

One expert says that the method is so “antiquated” that it should not be allowed according to reports in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. There is another method, much more advanced he adds and is “certainly superior and particularly should be in all of the urban areas. Hopefully they will re-evaluate that in light of this tragedy.” I’m sure they will, for a minute. Pacific Gas and Electric has 1.107 miles of pipe underground in urban areas and the more modern and advanced method, called “pigging” has only been used to check 69 of those miles.

Like the numerous recent disasters that have claimed lives and caused catastrophic environmental damage, the PG&E explosion in San Bruno was completely avoidable. The pipe was installed in the 1950’s and not much technological know how is need to recognize that a serious watchful eye should be kept on these structures.

But as always, safety comes after profit. “We have always been pretty skeptical about direct assessment”, Carl Weimer, director of a non-profit called the Pipeline safety Trust that was formed after a ruptured pipe killed three people in Bellingham Washington, tells the Chronicle. He makes another important point, “But it (direct assessment) was one of the compromises that ended up in the regulation.”

Why should there be such a compromise we would ask ourselves? The answer to that is simple, the more accurate method, the one that would protect the public more, is more costly. This conscious decision, not made by any of the workers that installed the pipe and certainly not those living and working above it, quite likely led to the destruction of 35 or more homes and the death and serious injury to people but that’s the market at work. Utilities would be “clearly driven for economic reasons to try to sell direct assessment as an effective means of providing safe operation” says Jim Hall, a former chairman of the NTSB. Not many Americans would oppose ending wars that cost $10 billion or so a month to create employment other than the war industry for our youth while at the same time making neighborhoods safer as well as friends abroad.

The political system is completely corrupt and legislators cannot be relied upon to protect the public, surrounded as they are, by professional bribers that they call Lobbyists here in the US. Being a briber is actually a legitimate profession here. The main problem is that the production and distribution of energy in society is, like medicine, in private hands and for profit. Profit making will always trump safety.

It seems to me, that under public worker/community control and management, these issues, safety of structures for example, would not be left to regulators who are forced to make “compromises” that cost lives but could be taken up in each area or community by committees that are comprised of workers and residents in that community and workers who work in it. Such committees should also have workers in the industry concerned on them, with representatives from the Unionized (rank and file elected reps) and non Union sectors. This is simply to maintain the safety of such structures but obviously this type of involvement should also be applied to manufacture and indeed the decisions about how we produce energy for society as a whole. Those who use something should determine its use.

The point is that the same old sad tale is being told after the fact and no one is really surprised any more, people just accept it as the usual corrupt, thieving capitalist system doing what it does. Given the lack of any explanation in wider society, some people often make the mistake of blaming these disasters on corrupt individuals and individual greed rather than the natural consequences of an economic system based on private ownership and profit.

Given the lack of any major social force, (the Union leaders refuse to take play an independent role and simple plead with the capitalist politicians to be nicer) challenging this situation and offering some sort of alternative, this news serves to simply demoralize people further strengthening the view that there’s nothing we can do about it.

That’s the purpose of the mass media though isn’t it?