The PG&E Toxic Fire Disasters of 1996-2023 | Episode 63

Mee what hella? I asked myself. I'm trying to recreate that as switch as possible. Something I've ever laughed like that in my life. That's new? What is that? This is my new laugh? For twenty twenty four, Love, we have a spanking new podcast for your ear holes, Calm Done Generation, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts Later, dumers, what I Am about to tell you will sound like nonsense, shocking, highly flammable nonsense unless you are from California. Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast to get. We are going to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and on inspiring but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human history and around the world. On today's episode, we'll learn all about what it's like to work at what I'm hoping is the worst utility company anywhere in the Americas. We'll look at some of the most backwards and evil business accounting of all time, and we'll learn what happens when a sidewalk explodes beneath your feet. This is not the show you play around kids, or while eating, or even in a mixed company. But as long as you find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something that could potentially save your life. Our work is done. So with all that said, shoot the kids out of the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and let's begin. Doomsday has always defied the mold of true crime podcasts. Together, we have focused on the underserved needs of a negligent homicide enthusiasts from around the world. But today we break our own. Let us begin our story with a little true crime. We start our tail at the Indianapolis home of Montserrat Shirley and her boyfriend Mark Leonard. Back in twenty twelve. Shirley and Leonard found themselves a little low on cash, but full of creative solutions, just like me. But that's where the similarities end. I do know how the mind can go to weird places when stressed, and when Shirley and Leonard needed to solve a few financial issues, their minds went to insurance fraud. You mean, like throwing themselves on someone's car hood and claiming they were run over like something they'd seen in a Russian dash cam compilation. No, I mean that would have been great, but no, not exactly. They gathered a small group of trusted friends to tamper with their furnace and gas line in hopes of a bit of a payday from their insurance provider. Instead, they flattened a good chunk of their Richmond Hill neighborhood. Have you ever actually seen a house explode from a gas leak? If not, nothing could really prepare you for the speed and ferocity of it. All they wanted was to wipe out or kill their debt, but instead they wiped out dozens of homes, and they killed their neighbors, John and Jennifer Longworth. In their imagination, they had been hoping for about three hundred thousand dollars, but instead they caused a few million in damages and traumatized a whole lot of people, And they got fifty years in prison. Surely seemed genuinely remorseful for what they had done, but not as bad as the guy two streets over with a mailbox sticking out of his chest. And I know I've mentioned somewhere before that some tool not too far from here tried the same thing about thirty years ago. He painted some swastikas on his house and tampered with his gas line, flattening most of his neighborhood and lading his roof almost intact onto Highway FARA one, the largest and busiest highway on the planet. That's right, five hundred and fourteen miles or eight hundred and twenty eight kilometers of fear and loathing. I lost my own car to it just a few nights ago. And I know Los Angeles loves to complain about his traffic, but I've driven in LA and what a pleasure compared to the four oh one. I share this tale to anyone out there quietly planning some elaborate utility or gas company scam, and I just have to say, don't do you have any idea how many people across North America successfully scam their utility companies this way? Well, you could count them on two hands if one of those hands were blown off at the wrist and the other one had no fingers. I actually shared this to plant the idea that public utilities could be dangerous. And we're going to loop back to this pretty hard. It's going to be a weird, hot and bumpy ride for today's story. We're leaving the crossroads of America and heading west all the way till our feet get wet. Welcome to sunny California, the Golden State, for a quick overview of people seeing it for the first time. The first human visitors laid eyes on it about ten thousand years ago. They saw the palms and sparkling shores and were like, yeah, this will do. And they had a pretty good run of it up to about fifteen forty two. When the Europeans arrived. They put all their towels over all the chairs and they just started measuring stuff. So that made things awkward for about the next two centuries until the Spanish set up shop, followed by the Mexicans and then again. In eighteen fifty California underwent its greatest change and officially became an American state, and it was all postal codes and property taxes from there. Speaking of utilities, in the eighteen fifties, every state had been looking for ways to light their streets and power their machines for as long as anyone could remember. Burning fuels like casts and oil did the job well for our area code today, the San Francisco Gas Company had been founded to fill the need, but as gas lamps started looking to go electric, the California Electric Light Company was founded also in San Francisco. It became the first of its kind in the country, and with any it powered the first outdoor public electric light in front of the San Francisco City Hall, which was also the first in the country. I tell my kids about the story of Edison and the invention of the electric light bulb, and I do it at my own peril. See the legend knows that he tried two thousand different variations of glass and bulb shape and filament type before he found the right combination to make the first incandescent electric light bulb, which became the oil and gas lamp killer of its day. And I told them the story to hopefully instill some value of perseverance and believing in yourself no matter what. But they took it to me that Edison sucked at making light bulbs, and light bulbs could have been invented a lot earlier if the inventor didn't function like he had a head wound. So where were we? Oh, we know that California's gone electric, but it's not like oil and gas were going anywhere. In nineteen oh five, the San Francisco Gas Company and the California Electric Light Company merged into the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, or PG and E for short, and they didn't stop there. They felt like they'd become a kind of a partial voltron, you know, just a torso and a leg. So they took a look at the rest of the market and started hungry, hungry, hippoing up all the smaller electric and utility companies across the state. Electric companies had popped up everywhere like chloracne from our last episode. PG and E wasn't going to be able to afford to buy every single competitor out there, But it turns out they weren't going to need to because in nineteen oh six, there was a little something called the San Francisco Earthquake April eighteenth, nineteen oh six, a seven point eight magnitude quake killed thousands and turned eighty percent of San Francisco into a smoky, ruinous wasteland. And three thousand innocent people weren't the only thing that I wiped out. It managed to wipe out pretty much all of PG and e's remaining competition, and within a decade they became one of the top five largest utilities in the country. In an age before terms like usery laws and monopolies. PG and E became a juggernaut. Speaking of monopolies, by nineteen fifty five, PG and E had over eighteen thousand people on its payroll and it provided power to over eighty percent of the state. And the only people who enjoyed the kracklimbuzz of reliable electricity delivery more than consumers were investors. PGNE was a blue chip company that produced steady earnings and investor dividends, and for investors this provided an almost sexual level of attraction, and so PG and E developed endless growth strategies to help keep them happy. A lot of those strategies revolved around cost cutting, and this will provide a powerful theme for this story. For example, finding, extracting, and processing natural gas was expensive, so PG and E decided to build pipelines to bring it in cheaper from Texas to save a bucker two and this meant pipelines, which, believe it or not, have been a thing for about twenty five hundred years. You ever hear of an eternal flame. It's a place in the ground where natural gas seeps up and gets turned into a kind of place of worship. Lots of cultures have them, but because they couldn't figure out what was happening. They of course just chalked it up to the divine. But when the Chinese discovered them, they didn't apply any superstitions to it. They just began looking for as many ways as they could to begin routing it to other areas using a network of bamboo piping. Now, to move gas a really long distance, you need extra blowing facilities to help keep it moving. It can be a bit like blowing a ball through a hose. So they build compressor stations to keep the gas moving, including one in Hinckley, California. Hinkley, California, was a small town in the Majave Desert just outside Barstow, about one hundred and twenty miles northeast of Los Angeles. They built a compressor station in Hinckley to support a natural gas pipeline. Now, like all machines, pipelines require a certain amount of upkeep and care to keep things running smoothly and prevent things like rust or corrosion. And one of the cheapest commercially available corrosive inhibitors was called chromium six. It was cheap but not safe. Chromium six was known as a carcinogen. So these are the very early days of PGNE and we don't know too much about the company culture, what they believe in, or who they are as a people. All we really know so far is that they've got deep pockets. Oh and, from nineteen fifty two to nineteen sixty six, three hundred and seventy million gallons of chromium tainted wastewater was dumped into unlined pools in Hinckley, which then leached into the soil. Now, of course, the residents of places like Hinckley require groundwater to live, but this groundwater had been contaminated with a plume of toxic waste about two miles long and one mile wide, and it was only increasing over time. The residents figured it out back in nineteen eighty seven. When you find as many illnesses and birth defects in a town as small as Hinckley, you start testing things like the water, which they did. That's when they found their chromium flavor groundwater contained one hundred times Californian's maximum legal limit. Furious residents believed that PG and E knew all about this going back to the nineteen sixties, but pg AND's lawyers said that the frequency of these type of health problems was not statistically significant, which is really just lawyer talk for you can't prove anything if you don't listen to the Patreon version. I'll just tell you that PGNE did reach a financial settlement with the people of Hinckley, a historic record setting settlement, and the whole ordeal moved from the TV news to the big screen, brought to life by Julia Roberts. The regional water board ordered PGEE to clean the water. Hooray. Of course, what nobody tells you about groundwater cleanups is that they take thirty to fifty years. Oohoo. Now you might see this as a huge scandal that obviously brought the whole enterprise to its knees. But if you think that, you have a lot to learn about governmental bodies and utility companies. Gas and electric power are mandatories in a modern society. Those street lights outside your house are worth more to society than you, and people die without electricity, and because it is so vital, governments tend to give them a lot of leeway, like tiptoeing around a temperamental child. The relationship between the different levels of oversight and pg AND is going to frustrate you. I can promise you that, and fair warning, those frustrations overlap heavily. After all, they are a gas and electric company, so you will have to judge for yourself which caused the most destruction by the time we're done, and we will be jumping around in time to help to keep all that straight. For example, here's something you should know about power transmission. It's not too much to say that power lines serve as the veins that bring us our daily lifeblood. We are entirely, overly dependent on the stuff, and if you aren't a bird, you have no reason to touch one, because they're said to run anywhere up to one hundred degree celsius or two hundred and twelve fahrenheit. One time a power line snapped outside a place I worked, and where it landed, it melted into the concrete. So you think you're going to head outdoors to enjoy a bit of lovely weather when a breeze blows through and now there's a hissing, steaming power line laying across your patio furniture. Would you know what to do well? The danger of down power lines is not always immediately obvious. TV and movies have taught us that it will jump around and spark endlessly, but in reality, a down power line may show zero signs of being energized. And this is why the first step of dealing with a down power line is to always assume it's charged and just back off. You're gonna want to stay back at least thirty three feet or ten meters. That's the rule of thumb. In fact, if you see someone even closer who's come into contact with a power line, you can't even really help them. You walk up and grab someone who may or may not still be receiving an electrical shock, and you immediately become part of that electrical circuit. And now you're hoping someone wearing wooden stilts with rubber coated wooden bats for arms comes and carries you away. Well, good luck with that. Electricity travels through the ground in waves, and those waves lose power as they spread further away from the point of contact, and the difference in energy is called step potential, and we'll come right back to that. More often than not, the only chance you'll realistically have to come in contact with a down power line is after a storm, or maybe in a vehicle accident. If your car came into contact with a power line, just chill. Your vehicle provides some level of insulation and protects you from the risk of electric shock, and as long as you're not in some immediate danger like surrounded by a wall of fire, you are safest to stay put inside your car until the power company comes and deenergizes the lines. Okay, yeah, but what if I'm actually in one of those crazy movie situations and the power line is rehearsing for final Destination six or something, and fire is spreading and people are screaming at you to get out, and they're live streaming you to see how it all goes. Okay, sure, there are times when a little action maybe necessary. If fire or power line strikes present an immedia threat, you're gonna want to jump as far as you can from your car as possible, and you're also gonna want to keep your feet together. Remember step potential. If you spread your feet out, you could step into two areas of different electric potential, which is one way to measure how flammable you are. Electricity is always gonna want to move from a more powerful voltage area to a less powerful one, and you do not want to become the conduit. You obviously can't just walk and keep your feet together, so you have to shuffle, you know, without lifting your feet off the ground, And don't touch anything. You wouldn't know what to look at it. But down power lines can energize other nearby objects. And I'm talking fences, water pipes, bushes, trees, buildings, telephones, everything from manhole covers to rebar and pavement. So, like I said, ideally, don't touch anything. And obviously I say this last because you'd forget if I said it first. But call nine one one, And yeah, I know nine one way. Times are becoming out of control in most turban centers, and I know this from personal experience. But that said, when your brain panics and you can't even think how to call poison control or a utility company, just call nine one one. They've got everyone you could possibly need on speed dial. And here is the thing that will be such a big deal in this story. Everywhere I look, I see power lines intersecting with trees. Here in Canada, you just wait for enough snow to come rip off a branch and food. One to three chilly silent knights sitting in the dark, at least from my experience. But in California, you get all these old ass trees, they're all forgotten or ignored, and they interact with electricity in these remote and dried out old forests, and what you get is the potential for fire. Lots and lots of fire. And in nineteen ninety four in the Sierra Nevada, that's exactly what happened when a twenty one thousand volt power line brushed against a tree limb and it ignited. If you don't know the area, here's everything you need to know. The Sierra Nevada is a craggy saw like mountain range that separates California from Nevada. Sierra means saw in Spanish, and of all the ways to traverse it, the most famous way through was the Donner Pass, which if you never heard of it. In eighteen forty six, a group of pioneer settlers tried to get through the pass in a winter storm, and YadA, YadA, YadA. One half of the group ended up eating the other half of the group. By the time the Sierra Blaze was brought under control, it had burned through five hundred acres of thick brush and pine forests. It destroyed twelve homes twenty two other buildings, including a historic schoolhouse built in eighteen sixty eight, which, even though I've only really described this one fire, it is worth pointing out already that fires don't just destroy the odd historic site here and there, they can actively wipe out whole chunks of history from California's past, specifically old gold rush towns. PG and E hired contractors to trim trees along one hundred in five thousand miles or about one hundred and seventy thousand kilometers of power lines across California. Legally, a minimum distance around ten feet must be maintained between plant life and high voltage lines. Maintained, of course, being the key word. PG and E wasn't getting spanked because a tree had come in contact with a power line. PGNE stood charged with seven hundred and thirty nine counts of criminal negligence for failing to trim trees near its power lines. It took the court clerk an hour and a half that's one and one half hours ninety minutes to read all the charges. But did they look worried. They threw their contractors under the bus and During the trial, internal PG and E memos were entered into evidence that revealed that upper management actually praised managers for cutting down on tree trimming costs. And how does one cut down on tree trimming costs by cutting down on the number of trees trimmed? Of course, so yeah, it sounds bad. But again, did PG and E seemerned even when the prosecution showed that they actually managed to cut eighty million dollars from these kinds of safety programs and didn't just pocket it, they turned it into shareholder profit. This sounds pretty guilty. So did they lose the case? Well, yes and no. Yes, they were as guilty as possible and they were fined two million dollars. The Nevada County Deputy District Attorney even went so far as to say that hopefully this sends a message to the upper level management that they must do whatever is necessary to comply with law to protect public safety. Yeah, but they were fined two million dollars and this is a big butt. They saved seventy eight million dollars in doing it, spending two dollars to make seventy eight dollars. Oh, and the judge also could have ordered them to pay restitution to the property owners, but nah. In nineteen ninety faulty pgee equipment created sparks, igniting a fire into him a county that cost ten million dollars to fight. It was called the Campbell fire, and it burned almost one hundred and thirty thousand acres, destroyed twenty seven buildings. And remember if a single building burns to cinders, that would be terrible and maybe even tragic. So when I say twenty seven, but still a lot of good people came in to fight, including the army, and saved over fifteen hundred homes. Water bombers couldn't cut through the smoke, so helicopters with dumb buckets and infrared sensors had to be brought in to help guide ground crews. And in case you didn't guess, wild land firefighters have a ridiculously dangerous job. Fire can wash over you without warning. There are traps and burnovers and collapse in trees, not to mention the smoke in the heat. In the US alone, about one hundred are killed every year. In nineteen ninety two, the Fawn Hill Fire in Placer County burned only two hundred and fifty acres, but it went on to destroy eleven homes. The Sailor Fire three years later burned another one hundred and fifty acres, and in nineteen ninety six, an untrimmed tree brushed against a highvolt such power line just northeast of Sonoma, igniting the fire that destroyed twenty one hundred acres of wildland over three days. In nineteen ninety nine, one hundred and seventy foot tall rotten pine tree fell onto a power line near Camptonville in the Central Valley, about thirty miles north of Sacramento. The tree ignited and the resulting fire tore through the Tahoe and Plumus National Forests. It burned nearly twelve thousand acres over eleven days. Now, I tell you all of these quote unquote accidents because I think what makes humanity kind of cool is pattern recognition. We see faces in tree bark and clouds that look like mushrooms, and this is a unique gift that makes us natural problem solvers. It's how we got to be who we became as a species. You know, clever enough to recognize a clear and obvious pattern. So PGNI happily a cut a check for fourteen point seven million dollars, because even without a business degree, paying a little to get out of paying tens of millions on fire prevention seemed like a bargain. And to them, every fire was just God's way of clearing the vegetation for them. They were going to unveil this business strategy in Forbes, but they thought better of it. And I haven't said this yet, but these are the kinds of fires that are easily visible from space. The entire decade of the nineties, fire after fire, all with the exact same cause. And they must rest their checkbook on a mighty set of testicles for stability. But and this is another big butt, it wasn't just fires, forest fires, criminal negligence, corporate creed. I mean, it's all bad, but just wait. Around this time, the state decided to deregulate the electricity market. It was heralded as a win for the consumer, and it was going to help them keep money in their pockets. And at first pag and He said that they were against the idea, you know, but in that smirking, fist bump under the table kind of way, I mean less rules, yes, please, They spent more on lobbyists to make this happen than they were supposed to do on maintenance, and okay, yeah, at this point we can see that they're clearly a little cartoonishly mismanaged and at least a little evil. They celebrated the passing of the bill by selling off most of their power generating assets. Why generated themselves when they could just buy it cheaper from suppliers out of state. At least that was the plan. Most of what they had left were hydro electric plants, and as if on queue a drought came, they had backed themselves into a corner, they had no choice. They found themselves in a situation where they were now forced to buy energy from Enron n ron Ron is the kind of symbol of corporate greed and ethical bankruptcy that will hopefully be taught to future generations and hopefully as a cautionary tale. This company experienced a spectacular downfall, and in it it revealed financial deception, accounting fraud, and unethical practices that destroyed employees and shareholders alike. They wiped out the retirement savings of thousands, They screwed up the financial markets, and they nearly crippled the entire energy industry. When they declared bankruptcy with sixty three billion dollars in assets, it made it the largest bankruptcy ever. PG and E used to make their own power, and now they found themselves paying enrons fluctuated to gouge rates while selling at a fixed cost. And all they could do was just sit there and bleed ten million dollars a day. And in April of two thousand and one, after racking up about nine billion dollars in debt, PG and E filed for bankruptcy. And don't cry too hard, the state of California came in and bailed them out. PG and E had spent about twenty five million dollars lobbying for deregulation, only to turn around and receive a ten billion dollar bailout from the state, which, by my math means they never lost their status as a billion dollar company. So does the government now run the place? Did they demand any kind of oversight at all? No, it was all just keep doing what you're doing, let us know when you need more money. In fact, in two thousand and four, they found themselves with so much extra cash from the bailout they came at a bankruptcy early and paid its creditors record profits. How they ever generated a profit on their own is beyond me. They lost money on gas, they lost money on electric, They lost money on hydro. Was there anything else in their portfolio? You know, solar wind? Well, not exactly. If we go all the way back to nineteen fifty seven, Peach and E teamed up with General Electric to make history with the introduction of the Valacidos Atomic Energy Plant. This was the world's first privately owned and operated nuclear facility, of course California, and by the sixties, with the birth of the environmental movement, anything nuclear became a kind of a lightning rod for unwanted attention, and things only got worse in the seventies and eighties with the protests over the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo. Remember San Luis Obispo. We saw some fire tornadoes there, But on topic, environmentalists were all up in arms because they wanted to build a nuclear power plant at Bodega Bay directly over an earthquake fault line. You think the problem there would seem kind of obvious, but PG and poured money into this site for four years before they noticed a different kind of a problem. The building of the Diablo plant was a disaster, but more of an accounting and construction disaster than a three eyed fish story. They could not believe that this company had been allowed to play with the power of the atom, and they had no idea just how mismanaged they actually were. In nineteen eighty one, an engineer reviewed all the Diablo plant schematics and discovered that the reactor had basically been built backwards. The components of two reactors had been reversed. Just think of a right foot shoved into a left shoe kind of thing. I mean, you can do it, but you probably shouldn't. This all led to a small panic, followed by a bunch of expensive studies and rebuilding. And it was bad enough that they somehow had to rebuild it twice, but in the end they actually rebuilt it three times, which cost almost five billion more than expected. But where worry? Oh right, the government money. It rained down like mana from heaven, and now out of bankruptcy, the company decides a new vision is needed, so they bring in a new CEO, Peter Darby, and his vision for the company mostly involves cutting jobs. Companies love cutting jobs to make dividends. You probably don't know, but a dividend is what you get as an investor. It's your little piece of the company profits. And in tough times a company might shrink them, but you never just cancel them. Your shareholders were called for your head. Now, the quickest and therefore most popular way to spike shareholder profits and make sure they're happy is to cut jobs. You ever been a part of a mass layoff. Although salaries get reabsorbed and distributed to the investors, thousands of workers find themselves filing for unemployment, while shareholders are rewarded with hundreds of millions in cash rewards. Just think of it like that. You got your employee, your employer, and the shareholder. Now the shareholder actually holds a kind of like an employee life insurance policy on your head. So when that head gets removed and you lose your job, they collect on your policy benefit. The new CEO came across as being threatened by people with seniority, so he fired eight thousand of them. And the problem with that is that a lot of competence and technical experience was walking out the door. I mean, what could go wrong in two thousand and seven to rub salt into the wounds. The CEO, directly after slashing all those jobs, was featured in an article in Vanity Fair celebrating them as a climate activist. Speaking of hot air, the Santa Ana winds returned. They're basically hot, dry air that regularly blows out of the desert states across California to get out to sea. It can happen more than a dozen times a year, and it can last for days at a time. In two thousand and seven, winds were racing through up to eighty miles or a high hundred and thirty kilometers per hour, and of course fires broke out across Malibu and Santa Barbara. The inferno became known as the witch Fire, and this monster burned two hundred thousand acres. But this one was actually started by a competitor, the San Diego Gas An Electric Company, not PG and E. I mean, yes, two people died, forty firefighters had been injured, and more than eleven hundred homes were lost. But PG and E execs had a party. Yeah, when you get made employee of the month here, I believe they give you a gun. But Electric distribution and toxic plumes are not the only jewels in PG and E's murder gauntlet. We haven't even really discussed their gas distribution, not really, No one really had. They'd all been too busy abandoning their homes from the electrical fires. But it was a big part of the company. It's right there in the name. And the big problem facing gas distributors are gas leaks. The fewer the gas leaks, the better that you looked on paper, and PGNI had a kind of skeptical policy about that. Just really let the next sentence sink in. PG and E was giving bonuses to supervisors whose crews reported the fewest leaks. It really was the opposite of the sea something say something mentality being developed after nine to eleven, and not reporting something and not having something are not the same thing. In reality, workers had been seeing more and more leaks over time, but then they were given a financial incentive not to report them, and because there were so few reported leaks, money was cut from maintenance, which of course led to more leaks, and some worse than others. In two thousand and five, a forty seven year old mother of two, Lisa Nash, was walking to work on Kearney Street by the Bay in San Francisco's in Barcadero neighborhood. She was walking to her brand new job. She picked up a shiny penny off the ground and said, this must be my lucky day. And then she was bathed in flames as the sidewalk exploded into debris. Beneath her feet. An underground transformer had exploded, and the explosion was powerful enough to live twelve tons of cement. It even threw one hundred and fifty pound manhole cover thirty feet in the air, and Lisa was left with burns covering forty percent of her body, third degree burns on her hands, feet, and arms, second degree burns on her face, chin, neck, and ears, and her arms had been fractured into basic noodles, and she was put into a medically induced coma for five weeks, but she survived. Pg and E offered to pick up her medical bills and send some flowers and balloons for her hospital room, but she asked the doctors to fix up her hand enough so that she could give them the finger and went for and won a twenty million dollar payout instead. Lisa later gave a hearty thumbs up from her hospital bed, which fractured from the strain three years later. In two thousand and eight, on Christmas Eve no Less, a Rancho Cordova woman smelt gas near her home, so she phoned it into PG and E, and few hours later they sent out a tech to take a report, you know, maybe do some sniffing around. Natural gas is naturally odorless and colorless, which makes it fairly dangerous, so they add in a chemical called more captain that is often described as resembling rotten eggs, making it real easy to be sure if you're in trouble. This woman had a big dead spot under lawn where underground gas pipes had been repaired. Two years earlier. They'd been repaired and replaced with cheap, plastic, leak prone pipes. Remember back in our very first episode when I talked about that guy trying to use his Geiger counter but it fits out as soon as he turned it on and began melting a little in his hand. Well, it was the same idea here, except the thing here was this tech guy had as much experience reading gas detectors as the homeowner. Neither had received any real training, and if they had, they'd have known that the leak was extremely high. But before anyone could say or do anything about it, a young woman in the house lit a cigarette. In an instant, the explosion destroyed at least three houses, killing one and seriously injuring five live. Hey, what's that sound on the roof? I hear? Could it be the sound of Santa an eight tiny reindeer? No, it's just bits and pieces of some neighbor's porch returning to earth. Pg and E said in a statement that our focus from the very beginning has been doing the right thing for the families who were impacted. But when asked if they would be checking all the other potential faulty repairs that were likely made in the area using the same cheap piping, they were all, we'll get back to you on that. Besides, they get a fine. They get a fine. The fine is always less than what they say by skipping the maintenance, and in the end they just passed the cost on to the consumer. The death Star may have been a more ethical place to work at this point, when you think about it, You got to carefully weigh out your ethics when you sign on to work on a death Star. That said things are about to kick up a notch. To do that, we travel to the Crestmoor neighborhood of San Bruno, about twelve miles or twenty kilometers south of San Francisco. Beneath the intersection of Earl Avenue and glen View Drive, a thirty inch natural gas transmission pipeline delivered natural gas under high pressure from a production facility to distribution centers and beyond. Just think of it like a thirty inch wide fire hose blasting natural gas hard enough to push across states or even entire regions. And all this meant that the pipe was under as much as fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. That is the same amount of pressure that you would find three thousand feet or almost one thousand meters below water, only in this case its pressing outwards. That is, until a defective weld in the pipeline near Earl and glen View finally called it quits and ruptured. The date was September the ninth, twenty ten. The resulting explosion registered as one point one on the Richter scale, and it ignited a massive fireball more than one thousand feet high that Ngulph the area and was fueled by a torrent of escaping natural gas. When the dust cleared, they were left with a crater big enough to park almost forty t dodged caravans in and a forty foot tall fountain of flames shooting out of the ground. Thirty eight homes were destroyed by the blast. Thirty eight and another seventy were damaged. Try Google mapping any subdivision and count out that many homes. I mean, that is a big area. Amazingly, only eight people died and another sixty were injured. Investigators concluded the pipe had been poorly welded when it was installed back in nineteen fifty six. For reference, Sputnik launched in nineteen fifty seven. The pressure on the pipeline had been increased over time, which overstrained the fault, and it didn't take long for residents to start worrying about all the other pipelines same as Rancho Gordova. The publican investigators demanded to know how many other pipes had the same potential faults, but PGE couldn't or wouldn't say. They simply didn't have a record or a map of the installations or the pipe fitting, or records of who installed them, or of who manufactured them, or what they were even made out of. Any records had been lost to the ages and old filing cabinets across the state decades ago. Nothing had ever been digitized, and some of them may have even burned down by now. The cause of the blast had been a defective seam in a world in a pipeline that PG and E had quietly listed as seamless, but of course they did not share that with the public. What they actually said was that they couldn't tell them because it was a security risk. And when they were asked to clarify, they said they couldn't because it was a security risk. And I'm thinking they were talking about job security. They stood convicted of lying to investigators. So okay, here comes the checkbook. Now many people say money can't buy happiness, but it certainly can buy the hell out of contentment and relaxation. But if this wasn't frustrating enough already, at this same time, PG and E successfully lobbied Congress for a billion dollar tax break. And again they say it takes money to make money, but in this case it cost them about eighty million dollars to secure one billion. I could use one hundred thousand dollars, but there is not a lender on the planet who's going to grant it to me for the equivalent of eight dollars. PG and was fined one point six billion for causing the explosion, which was the largest such punishment ever handed down to an American utility, and they were put on probation. They were given a few thousand hours of community service and told that they had to clean up their act, whatever that means, and they were forced to take out newspaper ads and TV spots explaining why they sucked. So for the next few years, PG and E got a new CEO and another new outlook. PG and E got another new CEO and a new outlook. I don't even mention their names at this point anymore. This CEO wanted to focus on repairs and maintenance, and believe it or not, things actually improved, except for the part where they were so focused on the gas issues they'd completely fallen asleep on the electrical issues. A drought began in California in two thousand and seven, and by two thousand and eight it had become the driest year on historical record, seventeen hundred fires broke out. It was bad, like National Guard and prison labor brought into help, kind of bad. It kind of shocked scientists how bad it actually became. You ever hear of a flashed drought. It's the equal but opposite thing as a flash flood, and California was facing a mega drought. It was the worst one in twelve hundred years. And at the same time, because no one was out there managing the woods, no one noticed the invasion of the bark beetle. This nasty little an killed millions of trees, and because nature is crazy, managed to make them more chemically flammable in death than they were in life. And millions of trees had died. In twenty fifteen, a gentle contact between a tree and a PGA power line near Butte Mountain Road in Amador County spark Well, you already know the words. There was a fire, and strong winds caused it to spread rapidly in all directions. Residents faced the panic of a quick evacuation, combined with the heart wrenching decisions of what to leave behind, and then found themselves jammed in heavy traffic on evacuation roots, aircraft, bulldozers, and ground crews were used to try and contain the fire, and it burned for twenty two days, consuming seventy one thousand acres of forest. Well not just forest, it also destroyed three hundred and sixty five homes, more than nine hundred structures, and killed two all in an area big enough to park almost thirty million Dodge caravans. It became the seventh most destructive wildfire in California's history, and as a result, PG and E was fined about eight million dollars. Early on November eighth, twenty eighteen, the winds picked up again, so PG and E looked at the situation and developed an action plan to combat forest fires. Action plan set in quotes and here it is that they were never going to be able to stop their lines from causing fires, so they simply turned off the power to millions of consumers if it got too windy out. Now, we have spent no small amount of time on this podcast poking fun at meteorologists for being victims of their own profession. Because weather is chaotic and largely unpredictable, which means PG and E had decided to play a dangerous and annoying game trying to outsmart nature. And it wasn't even a new idea. PG and E had begun rolling blackouts way back in January of two thousand and one. If you don't know what a rolling blackout is, some people call them brownouts, and it's basically utility roulette. The idea is an area doesn't have enough electricity to power all the homes, so the utility selectively decides to shut off certain neighborhoods to help spread the power out to the rest. It's the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few. Of course, if you remember the scene from Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying in the intermix chamber and sliding down the glass and saying goodbye, and that is exactly what you would expect to find with poor, unexpecting cares California is melting away in their homes with no power. And of course, when I say the few, I meant poorer people in cursed area codes. But the company had taken so much heat from the public on this decision that it kind of made them second guess themselves, and they decided that maybe the wind wasn't that bad this day, and they left the power on. Now, the only thing holding high voltage power lines off the ground and away from all that juiceless, dry ass woodland goodness, are transmission line towers. Two thirds of PG and ESE towers were built between nineteen twenty and nineteen fifty, and they had no idea how old the other thirty percent were. A tower's life expectancy is sixty five years, but the average age of their towers was sixty eight and the oldest one that they knew about was one hundred and eight. Part of PG and e's grid actually qualified for the National Historic Registry, you know those sites that get those historic plaques. Yeah, of course, California was a state with no state or federal rules about maintenance. And the towers may look like they were wood from a distance, but up close they're pretty much just rust and legally that was okay, So when it came to it, the company warned any workers who would actually climb the towers to be careful because they were well so brittle. In December twenty ten, five PG and E towers collapsed in a single storm. A large scale inspection revealed that twelve hundred towers were just as bad off, and another ten thousand needed serious repairs. About an hour into the decision to keep the power on this day, a suspension hook holding up a highly energized line in Butte County snapped and hung, barfing sparks across the dry forest floor. The hook had needed replacing for about fifty years, but it was kind of relegated into a permanent spot on PG and ees to do list. Paradise, California, is a town perched on a ridge in the foothills above the Sacramento Valley. It was said to be so thick with trees that it was hard to see at a distance. On November tenth, the people of Paradise started calling nine one one as the entire horizon became nothing but a glowing wall of smoke. But they were told that the fire was pretty far away and they had nothing to worry about. What nine one one didn't realize was that the fire was actually moving a football field every second and bearing right down on them. It became known as the Campfire, and it mercilessly destroyed more than ninety percent of the towns of Paradise and Concow. More than eighteen thousand structures were erased, and over one thousand of its residents were turned into homeless refugees. With the obvious exception of the eighty four who died, most of the people who died were older with mobility issues. They died in their cars, They died on their porches. One man died after trying to protect himself from the flames by submerging himself in his tub. The campfire would be remembered as the most deadly and destructive fire in the history of California. And we'll come back to that. Sixteen and a half billion dollars in damages, all from a single janky hook that wore out fifty years earlier. The California Public Utilities Commission determined that this was a customer issue, the responsibility lay on them for living so close to power lines. It created new laws allowing utilities to pass the costs of fires on to their customers. The fires of twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen killed one hundred and seven people. PGE pled guilty to eighty four felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for those that died. They stood convicted of the deadliest corporate crime in American history, and it only cost them a four million dollar fine. You might not remember the campfire by name, but you may remember the time that Donald Trump was telling Californians that they needed to sweep their force like they do in Norway. The Norwegians may have had no idea what he was talking about, but this whole episode is so crazy, I'm going to agree with Trump. Before the twenty seventeen fires, PG and E stock was at seventy dollars, but it had dropped to six. Moodies downgraded their credit rating, so they fired their CEO and began filing for bankruptcy again. They faced at least thirty billion dollars in damages from lawsuits, but bankruptcy would protect them from victims making claims against them, which was great for the stockholders. Because the stocks had tanked, hedge funds came in and bought tons of it. Of course, there were conditions. They demanded a new board, and they got one made up by at least half Wall Street hedge fund guys. Back in the nineteen fifties and sixties, PG and E was said to be loved by its employees and customers alike. But one employee, upon retiring, said there were very strong changes in the wind. It was no longer the family type company. I think there was a colder, more calculating and profit making attitude that came from the top level management and filtered down. It was a very somber retirement speech. Even the head of the California Public Utility Commission had had enough turns out. Hearing from thousands and thousands of homeless fire victims day after days not that much fun. In fact, he went on to compare it to a job he had when he was young at a meat packing plant trying to pick up dead cows. On July thirteenth, twenty twenty one, a sixty five foot tall tree fell over in the Feather River Canyon. It landed on a twelve kilovolt power line, and the result became known as the Dixie Fire. Amazingly, this tree the fell had been weakened in a previous pg in the inferno, and the result burned for three months. It burned one million acres, including a whole bunch of small towns just burnt right off the map. Four firefighters were killed or injured, and by the time it was under control, it had become the single largest fire in all of recorded California history and even made air unbreathable as far as Colorado. It also cost almost six hundred and fifty million dollars to fight, which made it the most expensive fire in US history. Twenty twenty one was the hottest and driest year on record, which we'd already mentioned about previous years. As of twenty twenty, every year seems to get a little warmer and a little dryer across California. The Dixie Fire caused PG and E stock to drop, which was an unacceptably bitter pill to swallow for their consumers. Say what, Yeah, no, See, the company agreed to pay fifty five million dollars to those affected in exchange for foregoing an illegal responsibility. We're just going to plead down and never hear about it again. But here's the thing. They made what some thought as an overly generous settlement offer, but in order to take it, you had to accept a good chunk of it in PG and E stock. Offering victim stock in the company that destroyed their lives was seen as easier than them visiting and slapping every victim in the face separately. This from the same company that when it was discovered that Hinckley's contaminated groundwater had infiltrated way further than originally thought. Back in twenty ten, they began selling residents bottled water, and then they started buying up the property of anyone who left. While on probation for its initial gas line failure, PG and E was responsible for thirty one wildfires that burned nearly one point five million acres, destroyed nearly twenty four thousand buildings, and killed one hundred and thirteen people. Their bills may thank you for choosing them as a company, but this was and is not a company with anyone's best interests at heart. PG and E could have avoided the danger of wildfire entirely if they just invested in infrastructure upgrades or buried their cables. Instead, they chose to prioritize the needs of investors over human safety every chance it got. In researching, I started developing a crazy theory that PG and E secretly wishes California just looked more like Nevada. It's not even Lahis for me to say this. PG and E has decades of experience in cost cutting negligence, resulting in outages, burning millions of acres, damage, death. But obviously the real loser in all of this is the taxpayer. Between nineteen ninety eight and two thousand and two, they spent almost one billion dollars fighting these fires. Between twenty eight and twenty twenty two, that figure nearly tripled, and as a human you can see the pattern. In twenty twenty two, US District Judge William Alsup warmed that PGE remains a continuing menace to California. He warned that they've done very little to change their ways and describe their decades of business as a crime spree. Oh and this will be upsetting, maybe potentially the most upsetting or unfair point of this entire podcast. If you've paid more than a single dollar in federal taxes in the last decade and a half, you have contributed more than PG and E. Pacific Gas and Electric hasn't paid federal taxes since two thousand and eight. Man alive. There is no real good way to do this. Want to see the most awkward transition ever. If you are a regular listener, consider becoming a supporter. I promise you I will not burn down or blow up your home a lot of people have been jumping on board lately, and my god, I could not appreciate it more. You people are really helping me fulfill my dream of doing this full time. And like I always say, if you and a few thousand of your friends could spare a buck or two, you would really help keep the show and frankly me alive. But of course, if you're not looking for a whole relationship, you can visit buy me a coffee dot com slash doomsday to make a one time donation. And for those of you who do, I appreciate you from a deep place. Now. If you had been listening to this episode on Patreon, you would have heard us discuss the incredible medical weaponry known as the electric Eel. We talked about how a fruit company ruled entire countries with an iron fist. We talked about the unlikely corporate destroying bunderkind Aaron Brockovich. We had an explanation as to why you are worth more to your employer dead than alive. We debated the ethics of working on the Death Start, and we also climbed into a hellmout. I think getting episodes a little early with no sponsor interruptions and with additional ridiculously interesting material is kind of worth it, and if you agree, you can find out more at Patreon dot com, slash Funeral Kazoo, quick but heartfelt shout out to Eric Lee, Muriel Murrat, Luke Chanel, j Wall, John Cotch, Tom and Trouble Megan Fincher, Aroa, Marie, Isabella Rodriguez, Elizabeth Edwards, Brandon Dean, Nicole Mazzolo. Oh, and I hope I get this guy's name right, Scott Warnez. Thank you all for helping me. If you ever just want to chat, you can reach out on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as Doomsday Podcast, or fire an email to Doomsday Pod at gmail dot com. I really do love hearing from you all, but again, sometimes we may not think so good, so I'm typically pretty slow to respond. That said, older episodes can be found wherever you found this one, and while you're there, please leave a review and tell your friends. I always thank my patroon listeners, but I also say, if you can spare the money and have to choose, I ask you to consider making you a donation to Global Menic. Global Medic is a rapid response agency of Canadian volunteers offering assistance around the world to aid in the aftermath of disasters and crises. They're often the first and sometimes the only team to get critical interventions to people in life threatening situations, and to date they have helped over three point six million people across seventy seven different countries. You can learn more and donate at Globalmenic dot CA. On the next episode, do you like your episodes a little on the heavy side, Then if you do, you're going to love the hell out of this next one as we slide into a tale of terror for the record books. It's the Frank Rockslide disaster of nineteen oh three. We'll talk soon. Save to goggles off and thanks for listening.