Flutterby™! : PG&E lost pipeline records 2011-04-22 16:18:57.993801+00

PG&E lost pipeline records

2011-04-22 16:18:57.993801+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

Picked up Terry Pratchett's Going Postal again because I needed something mindless to read. One of the story threads is about the "clacks", an optical telegraph system which is failing because a set of investors bought it and stopped maintenance in order to extract maximal profits from it before they ran it into the ground.

I present to you Pacific Gas & Electric's management admitting that they've basically done the same thing.

This company claims to make pipe inspection robots that look like they could catalog PG&Es infrastructure.

When my plumber cut the fiber optic cable that joins the adjacent fire station to their safety network, among other things discovered was that it was not the grade fiber that was supposed to be buried there, not rated for burial in a conduit.

Then there is the pipe company a couple miles from here that used to sell a lot of steel pipe to the nuclear industry. Good prices. Not a lot of overhead either. They were just buying normal grade pipe, washing off the markings, and repainting it as the grade the nuclear people wanted.

The horrific part of this is that the explosion in San Bruno is apparently due to PG&E making the wrong assumptions about what sort of pipeline got laid, and now they're asking the PUC to accept similar assumptions about all the other pipes.

I was just reading the comments on The Machine That Changed the World on Amazon. (which was mentioned in the review of The Success of Open Source). In the comments someone was talking how it costs more to fix something than building it right the first time. In this case, it costs more to document something later than document thoroughly the first time.

At some point there were several people standing around a trench as each piece of pipe in PG&E's gas lines were laid. No one thought to write down what kind of pipe they were laying?