Gas Pipe Explosion | featured news

PG&E said its chief executive will retire at the end of the month and it is conducting a search for a successor, a surprise change at a utility rocked by a series of setbacks. Peter Darbee, PG&E's chairman and chief executive, was brought in in 1999 as an outsider who would bring fresh ideas, but appears to have been felled by inattention to the bread-and-butter basics of the utility business: providing safe and reliable service to customers.

State regulators in 2007 gave Pacific Gas and Electric Co. the go-ahead to spend $5 million of ratepayer money to replace a 62-year-old section of the same pipeline that exploded last week in San Bruno.

State and congressional lawmakers moved Tuesday to impose new requirements for automatic or remote-controlled shutoff valves on pipelines after last week's San Bruno natural gas conflagration raged for nearly two hours before the fuel supply could be ...

The tragic explosion of a gas pipeline in a San Francisco suburb has shed light on a problem usually kept underground: Communities have expanded over pipes built decades earlier when no one lived there.

As search crews find the remains of more victims in the suburban San Francisco blast that killed at least four and injured dozens, authorities say the gas pipeline that caused the inferno was ranked as high risk.