San Bruno Fire Disaster

[loCAtek]

...no joke:
~Steve once sent me a DVD of '911 In Plane Site' to convince me of his comprehension of government conspiracies.

[oldr_n_wsr]

...no joke:
~Steve once sent me a DVD of '911 In Plane Site' to convince me of his comprehension of government conspiracies.

Don't even get me started on this crap, not after spending the better part of saturday at a memorial for the victims of 9/11.

[Scooter]

Somebody needs to do an Erin Brockovich and go thru every piece of PG&E internal correspondence they can get their hands on, by fair means or foul.

First step should be to immediately file suit and get an injunction prohibiting PG&E from disposing of or shredding or deleting anything.

[Jarlaxle]

If they were even half-smart, it's already gone!

[Andrew D]

Some raw news footage!!!


If anyone can get the word out to the victims, any one who's taken damage to their property; be careful of this insurance co. trick, this happened to my ex-grandmother-in-law when her town was hit by a tornado:

Of course, they don't want to pay out the whole sums to those who have lost their homes, so a representative will come around and hand the parties a check of about 10% the worth of the claim. This is supposedly an 'installment' on the rest of the claim. DO NOTHING with this check! The funds are good, the check will clear BUT if you do anything with it, even so much as deposit it, then that becomes your acceptance of the sole obligation the insurance co. has to pay on your claim.
If you do nothing but hold it, then they have to give you the full amount of your claim.

I don't know if all companies will try this, but I know some will.

At least in California, that is an insurance company's one-way ticket to a whopping punitive-damages award. A lot of my work is advising property insurers. If I found out that an insurer client of mine (or even one of its employees) was doing something like this, I would be screaming (figuratively) at the head of claims adjustment to get letters out immediately assuring the recipients of those checks that they were free to cash them, that the checks were in fact advance payments and not claim settlements, and the the insureds should go ahead and submit their claims in the regular fashion.

As is so often the case, the best legal advice to an insurer is "pay $1 million now or pay $10 million later". (It used to be "or pay $50 million later," but the US Supreme Court has put limits on punitive damages.)

Most property insurers in California have become, through monetarily painful experience, quite familiar with the consequences of dicking their insureds around like that. Sure, if you have a legitimate ground for denying a claim (for example, it falls sqarely within a policy exclusion) or disputing the amount of damages (no, the fact that the wrecked piano was your dead grandma's does not make it worth ten times as much), assert it. But if you try to screw your insureds with this kind of thing, you will pay. And pay. And pay.

Most property insurers get it. Like most businesses, it's about the bottom line. And getting slapped with zillions of dollars in punitive damages that they could have avoided by paying a legitimate claim in the first place does not increase profits. (Which doesn't mean that they don't sometimes try to pull such crap anyway; it just means that they -- especially the smarter ones -- don't try it nearly as much as they used to.)

(I cannot say the same about other kinds of insurance; I don't have the requisite experience. I have heard that things are still far worse in the health insurance industry, but perhaps Sue U could shed more light on that.)

[loCAtek]

I see, this was about ten years ago in the state of Arkansas.

[dales]

More BLOOD on PGE's hands?

Article:Pipeline fix was planned - but never happened

Pipeline fix was planned - but never happened
David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

(09-15) 16:24 PDT -- Three years ago, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. asked state regulators for $4.9 million to replace a portion of the same natural gas pipeline that ruptured last week and set a San Bruno neighborhood on fire.

State regulators agreed, and the work was scheduled to be done in 2009. The price became part of the rates all PG&E customers pay.

But the pipeline replacement - in South San Francisco, a few miles north of last week's blast site - never happened. And now PG&E wants an additional $5 million to do the same job, according to PG&E documents released today by a consumer group.

"If they'd fixed the section they said they said they were going to fix, maybe they would have found something a few miles south - we don't know," said Mike Florio, senior staff attorney for The Utility Reform Network, which released the documents.

PG&E did not respond to a request for comments.

The documents illustrate a problem that has long infuriated PG&E critics.

The company has a history, they say, of deferring repairs and using maintenance money for other purposes. In one infamous case, a 1998 report from the California Public Utilities Commission found that the utility had taken $77.6 million that was supposed to be spent trimming trees near power lines - a vital step in wildfire prevention - and used it to boost corporate profits instead.

Florio said it's often hard to track where money not spent on deferred maintenance goes. But PG&E, he said, had to spend $103 million in the last three years redoing a leak-detection survey of its natural gas distribution network that had been marred by record falsification and sloppy work. The company also spent, last year, about $62.5 million more than anticipated on employee bonuses, he said. Perhaps some of the money, Florio said, went there.

"The conclusion is, they're putting profits before customer safety," he said.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 1FEM36.DTL

© 2010 Hearst Communications Inc.

[Sue U]

Most property insurers get it. Like most businesses, it's about the bottom line. And getting slapped with zillions of dollars in punitive damages that they could have avoided by paying a legitimate claim in the first place does not increase profits. (Which doesn't mean that they don't sometimes try to pull such crap anyway; it just means that they -- especially the smarter ones -- don't try it nearly as much as they used to.)

(I cannot say the same about other kinds of insurance; I don't have the requisite experience. I have heard that things are still far worse in the health insurance industry, but perhaps Sue U could shed more light on that.)

Well, if "most property insurers get it," that doesn't seem to include State Farm (at least as of a few years ago), which was charged with racketeering for its denial of Hurricane Katrina claims. But in general, property claims are resolved more fairly and expeditiously because valuation is pretty straightforward and coverage/exclusions are required to be in reasonably plain language, and causation is usually readily identifiable. In my experience, the worst and most devious are the auto liability insurers in handling personal injury claims. Health insurers typically attempt to screw doctors far more frequently and systematically than they do the insured patients, but over the last 10 years health plans have gotten super aggressive in pursuing "reimbursement" claims against their beneficiaries who have gotten recoveries in personal injury cases -- regardless of whether medical expenses were even recovered, or whether the injured person received adequate compensation for other uninsured losses.

[Lord Jim]

But the pipeline replacement - in South San Francisco, a few miles north of last week's blast site - never happened. And now PG&E wants an additional $5 million to do the same job, according to PG&E documents released today by a consumer group.

Okay, now let me make sure I've got this straight...

PG&E get's approval to charge consumers 5 mil to fix a section of pipe....

They take the money, don't do the repair, and now they're asking for another 5 mil to do the same thing they didn't do with the money they were paid in the first place?

Where the hell were the state regulators? Why wasn't PG&E required to provide proof that they had actually performed the work they were allowed to charge for?

This looks like straight up fraud to me, with possible collusion from somebody in the State Regulatory Commission....

There should be a criminal investigation, and if wrong doing is found those responsible should have the book thrown at them.

[Gob]

Okay, now let me make sure I've got this straight...

PG&E get's approval to charge consumers 5 mil to fix a section of pipe....

They take the money, don't do the repair, and now they're asking for another 5 mil to do the same thing they didn't do with the money they were paid in the first place?

Seems fair to me

[Jarlaxle]

Forget fraud: this sounds like FIRST DEGREE MURDER to me!

[Andrew D]

Let me begin with two things which I hope everyone, including those who have no interest at all in getting into a discussion about insurance law, will take to mind:

(1) Health insurers' decisions often make a huge difference in what happens to the patient: The patient makes a claim -- asks for a particular treatment or whatever -- before the outcome is determined: The health insurer's decision plays a significant, often determinative role in whether the patient lives or dies. And that puts us in the position of having to decide the worth of a patient's arms, legs, or life to her or him.

(2) In contrast, property insurers' decisions generally do not make a difference in what happens to the insured because those decisions are made when the calamity has already occurred: Generally (though certainly not always), when the insured makes a property-insurance claim, the insured's property has already been damaged or destroyed. And that puts us in th position of having to decide the worth of the destroyed property -- perhaps complicated, depending on the circumstances, but nothing like having to decide how much Betty or Fred's arms, legs, etc., are worth to Betty or Fred.

The point is that the health insurer's decision might well make a difference: Whether the patient does or does not get a particular treatment often depends on the health insurer's decision. But the property insurer's decision usually does not make a difference: Whether the insured's property is or is not burned to the ground or sucked up by a tornado or washed away by a flood or buried by a landslide or an avalanche usually has nothing to do with the property insurer's decision about anything.

Well, if "most property insurers get it," that doesn't seem to include State Farm (at least as of a few years ago), which was charged with racketeering for its denial of Hurricane Katrina claims. But in general, property claims are resolved more fairly and expeditiously because valuation is pretty straightforward and coverage/exclusions are required to be in reasonably plain language, and causation is usually readily identifiable. In my experience, the worst and most devious are the auto liability insurers in handling personal injury claims. Health insurers typically attempt to screw doctors far more frequently and systematically than they do the insured patients, but over the last 10 years health plans have gotten super aggressive in pursuing "reimbursement" claims against their beneficiaries who have gotten recoveries in personal injury cases -- regardless of whether medical expenses were even recovered, or whether the injured person received adequate compensation for other uninsured losses.

In context, I was saying that most property insurers in CA get it: "Most property insurers in California have become, through monetarily painful experience, quite familiar with the consequences of dicking their insureds around like that."

I am not familiar with the property-insurance laws in Florida. If those laws are such that they allow insurers to get away with -- or, perhaps more importantly, to think that they are likely to get away with -- such conduct, then those the laws need changing. (Which is not to say that near-totally unpredictable punitive-damages awards is the best way to do that; there are good arguments for, and also good arguments against, statutory penalty schemes such as that in (last time I checked, which was not recently) Louisiana.)

I agree that the ease of valuation makes a big difference: As I have posted before, if you own a $50,000 house, then that house is worth $50,000. And if you own a $500,000 house, then that house is worth $500,000. But a poor person's arms or legs are worth just as much to her or him as a rich person's arms or legs are worth to her or him.

And in the case of property insurance, even if the insurer has engaged in misconduct, that misconduct rarely makes any difference with respect to the core of the insured's damages. Yes, the insurer's dicking the insured around can end up costing the insured more money -- living expenses, attorneys' fees and whatnot. And if the insurer engages in such conduct, it deserves to suffer the consequences. Which is why I, on the insurer-defendant's side -- yes the horrible side of inexpressibly vile evil -- have so often ended up advising my clients just to pay the legitimate claims. But it is rare that the insurer's misconduct has any effect on the core (rather than incidental) damages (the value of the insured's house, etc.), simply because the property insurer usually does not get involved until after the insured's house has burned down (or whatever).

Contrast that against the health insurer. The property insurer's refusal (right or wrong) to pay the insured's claim usually plays no part in causation. That is, whether the property insurer's refusal to pay the insured's claim rarely causes, even in part, the insured's house to burn down.

But the health insurer's refusal to pay the insured's claim often plays a big part in causing the insured to lose her or his arms or legs or to die. The health insurer is asked to pay for a particular treatment; during the time that the patient's life, limbs, etc., are hanging in the balance, it refuses to do so; the patient dies. That does not necessarily mean that the patient would not have died if the insurer had paid for the requested treatment. But it does raise a host of questions that are not raised when, involving a property insurer's policy, the insured's house is struck by lightning. That is one of the reasons why, it seems to me (and as I have also previously posted), there is much stronger argument for a single-payer system in health insurance than there is in property insurance.

In health insurance, there is a substantial likelihood that the health insurer's response to the insured's claim will have a significant impact on whether the insured suffers the loss in the first place (e.g., losing a leg or not losing a leg); whereas in property insurance, there is very little likelihood that the property insurer's response to the insured's claim has any impact on whether the insured suffers the loss in the first place (i.e., by the time the insured makes the claim, the insured's house has already burned down (or whatever), and the insurer's response, whatever it may be, to the insured's claim will not change that fact). And in health insurance, there is the extremely difficult problem of putting a monetary value on what the insured has lost (arms, legs, life); whereas in property insurance, it is nowhere near so difficult (although it has difficulties of its own, such as attempting to determine the monetary value of claims for lost profits, extra expenses, and so forth) to ascertain the monetary value of what the insured has lost.

All in all, it seems to me that a single-payer system makes a great deal of sense in health insurance: We are trying to affect the outcomes -- we are trying to increase the likelihood that an insured will not lose her or his arms, legs, or life in the first place -- and we are confronted with nightmarishly difficult and perhaps insoluble problems of trying to determine how much the insured's arms, etc., are worth.

But in property insurance, it seems to me that a single-payer system makes very little sense: We are not, on the whole, trying to affect outcomes (there are premium discounts for having smoke alarms and so forth, but those are far from the core of what property insurance is about) -- the insured's house either already has or has not burned down -- and the problems entailed in determining what the insured's property is worth are nowhere near as difficult as trying to pin down the value of an insured's limbs.

In the context of health insurance, the question whether we should have a single-payer system raises all kinds of complex and difficult issues. But in the context of property insurance, the question whether should have a single-payer system can be put rather simply: Does it make sense for all of us taxpayers to contribute (i.e., to have no choice but to contribute) to a single-payer system so that if one of Donald Trump's buildings burns down, we all have to pay for it?

[loCAtek]

Interesting, ThX AndrewD and SueU.



Now we Californians thought we had it bad;

Some of Pennsylvania's natural gas pipelines are 120 years old.

[loCAtek]

Okay, just when I'd gotten used to living on one of these old pipelines;

PG&E's gas pressure hikes over legal limits raise grave concerns



By Steve Johnson
Mercury News
Posted: 02/03/2011 08:04:32 PM PST
Updated: 02/03/2011 08:13:11 PM PST

PG&E's revelations this week that its natural gas pipelines "accidentally'' exceeded the legal pressure limit 24 times over five years suggests the utility's gas operations are out of control, according to several pipeline experts.

"If you have frequent occurrences of over-pressure, something is seriously wrong with your systems," Richard Kuprewicz, a Washington state pipeline safety expert, said Thursday. Given this and past disclosures about PG&E after the Sept. 9 San Bruno gas-line explosion, "it's getting to where it's just embarrassing."

Others experts had never heard of a pipeline operator having so many illegal pressure hikes, and said PG&E's admission raises worrisome questions about how well the company is training its employees and the condition of its gas-line equipment.

"They should not have repeated incidents of the same kind of problem," said Robert Eiber, a Columbus, Ohio, pipeline consultant. "That says they are not maintaining their system the way they should."

Asked how many times its pipes exceeded the legal limit in other years, PG&E spokeswoman Katie Romans said that information "is not readily available."

However, she defended the company's operations.

"While we are unsatisfied with any over-pressure events in our service area,'' she said, that does not indicate "a more global issue regarding poor training or poor maintenance. PG&E has taken action as appropriate to address the
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root cause of each over-pressure event. "

The company, which manages more than 48,000 miles of gas lines, disclosed the extent of the problems in a letter Wednesday to the California Public Utilities Commission. Because of concerns that some of the gas lines might have been weakened by the pressure hikes -- which were as much as 50 percent above the legal limit on two Milpitas portions of pipe -- the state regulatory agency ordered PG&E to immediately lower the pressure to 20 percent below the legal limit on the four affected transmission lines.

The commission was concerned in part because of earlier revelations by the National Transportation Safety Board investigating the San Bruno explosion, which killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes. The board disclosed that the pipe -- which experienced a pressure surge -- burst at a level below the maximum PG&E had set for it. PG&E also had incorrect information about the pipe's construction, which might have led the company to give it a higher maximum operating pressure than the segment could withstand.

"Now that we're aware that there is some uncertainty about what PG&E knows about its pipes," any new revelations that raise doubts about how well those pipes are managed are regarded with grave seriousness, said Paul Clanon, the PUC's executive director. His agency intends to learn all it can about how the utility could have spiked the pressure beyond the legal limit so many times.

"I don't want to jump to conclusions," Clanon said of the pressure increases. "They can sometimes happen in swarms coincidentally. But it's an obvious question."

While minor pressure hikes above a pipe's legal limit aren't uncommon, they have to be reported to authorities when they exceed the limit by 10 percent, which happened in all 24 instances reported by PG&E. Eight of the excessive hikes were on the sort of transmission lines that exploded in San Bruno. The rest were on much smaller distribution lines that feed gas to customers.

In some cases, PG&E said, the pressure boost surpassed the limit by far more than 10 percent. It not only exceeded the limit by 50 percent in the Milpitas pipes on June 22 last year, but was 300 percent higher in a distribution pipe in the Salinas area in 2008.

Several pipe segments had been pushed past the legal limit more than once. The two in Milpitas, for example, each went past that mark three times -- on June 22 last year, Nov. 13, 2009, and Dec. 15, 2009. That suggests the pipes are linked together in a way that caused their pressure to rise simultaneously. But what caused those and the others to exceed the limit remains unclear.

PG&E has said only that inadvertent pressure spikes can stem from such factors as equipment failure, human error and liquid contamination. Romans said liquids can get into pipelines and clog filters and equipment that can control downstream pressure.

It also sometimes can freeze, causing a pipe's pressure-control unit to malfunction, said Terry Boss, senior vice president of environment, safety and operations for the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. Nonetheless, when asked how unusual it is nationwide for the pressure in pipes to exceed their legal limit by 10 percent, Boss said, "in interstate transmission lines, it is very, very rare."

Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, agreed that the instances reported by PG&E were unusual.

"This many accidental pressure increases indicate something is wrong with the pressure-control system -- including the people parts of the system," he said.

...now they say I could be blown up at any second, cause they don't give a rat's fart!

[rubato]

PG&E, privately owned, has one of the worst records in the state for cost, safety, providing service &c.

The LA County Dept of Water and Power, publicly owned, has among the best.

So much for the free-market ideologues.

yrs,
rubato

[Andrew D]

The principal achievement of LADWP has been the plundering of North California's water. LAWPD turned the Owens Valley into near desert. LAWPD was on its way to turning Mono Lake into a dry bed until it was stopped by a federal court.

LADWP tried the biggest water raid in American history with the obscenity known as the peripheral canal. For a look at how that vote turned out, see here -- a great example of one of the many reasons why North California and South California should be recognized as separate States. And now the odious idea is making a comeback.

If LADWP had its way, North California would be a dry wasteland.

[rubato]

A comparison of PG&E would most appropriately compare the provision of gas and electricity to their customers.


A comparison of the behavior of stakeholders in the western US in the area of water rights would begin with the acknowledgment that it is the history of peoples in different places and classes in the state taking resources from other places in a way adverse to less powerful groups or people or the environment. Hetch Hetchy flooded a valley said to be as beautiful as Yosemite to serve the interests of San Francisco and environs, Central Valley farmers killed the salmon runs on several rivers and have contributed to the decline of the delta by diversions, diversons to the Imperial Valley and Arizona from the Colorado have destroyed formerly productive agricultural land in Mexico, Klamath Valley farmers damaged the salmon runs in that river (probably for decades) by diverting too much water and allowing the river temp to rise, &c &c &c.


Were the beneficiaries of the DWPs provision of water more ruthless than the Citizens of San Francisco? Were the farmers of Fresno and Bakersfield who drained the American River more or less selfish than Pasadena suburbanites?


yrs,
rubato

[Crackpot]

Compared to hitler Pol Pot was a Saint

[Andrew D]

There are various proposals to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley by the Sierra Club, Hetch Hetchy Restoration, and others, and the California Resources Agency has studied (and presumably is still studying) the matter. And as the Sierra Club points out, its "restoration plan would not 'lose' the resource, or require 'another clean source of water.' The plan envisions simply collecting and storing the very same water somewhere downslope from Yosemite National Park in the high Sierra." I am not qualified to opine on the specifics, but the basic idea sounds good to me.

It is long past time for Central Valley agribusiness to adopt farming methods that require far less water. Still, at least they are consuming the water for something useful. Contrast that against the Coachella Valley (Palm Springs, etc.) -- yes, I know that it is not Los Angeles, but it is South California -- where water is pissed away on such obscenities as desert golf courses.

The American River has not been drained. Efforts to clean up the Klamath River are ongoing, and they have recently had some success. Diversions from the Colorado are neither North California's fault nor North California's problem.

No other institution has been as rapacious as LADWP. And it shows no inclination toward improving its behavior. As previously mentioned, had it not been blocked by legal action, it would have drained Mono Lake already, and it is attempting once again to wreck the Delta with a peripheral canal. (Lamentably, Governor Jerry Brown's position on the issue is unclear.)

Water agencies should not be judged solely by their ability to provide water to their customers but also by how they go about it. South California generally, and most conspicuously LADWP, has a prevailing attitude toward North California: colonialism. North California's resources exist primarily for the purpose of feeding not only South California's needs but also its preferences and even its most casual whims. North California should -- indeed, it is long overdue -- stop putting up with it. We need a two-State solution.

[Long Run]

Lots of people want to live in dry warm climates, but they want the lifestyle of a wetter climate. Here's a sampling from the not distant past.

WATER WAR ON TAP S. CALIFORNIA WANTS TO SHARE COLUMBIA RIVER
By Gil Bailey P-I Reporter
Tuesday, May 8, 1990
Section: News, Page: A1

Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn wants states in the Northwest to be ``good neighbors."

For Washington and Oregon, that means giving up 3 billion gallons of fresh, Columbia River water. Each day.

Dumping 90 billion gallons a day of Columbia River water into the Pacific Ocean is ``wasteful and sinful," the Southern Californian claims, and some of it would go a long way toward alleviating the devastating drought - the worst in four centuries - that has hit the area.

The response from Hahn's ``neighbors" so far has been uniformly unenthusiastic.

Still, Hahn plans to ask his board of supervisors today to approve a motion calling for diversion of the water, by way of a huge new aqueduct. He also suggested diversion of Snake River waters before they enter the Columbia to the Colorado River system, which also serves Southern California.

The call from Hahn reopens old water wars between California and the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest seemed to have won those 1967-68 and 1988 fights. Federal law requires that even a study of such diversions must have the approval of the governors of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1990/9005090054.asp