In the aftermath of the explosion of a high pressure natural gas pipeline causing several deaths and property loss in San Bruno Ca., it is becomming clear that the Utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is having problems providing information to the public and to regulators about the maintainence and risks associated with this part of the infrastructure and that their neglect and may be due to more bottom-line concerns than for the safety of their customers.
To be fair, it may turn out that NTSB's investigation of the cause could turn up that other construction in the region of the break could have compromised the gas line, but as people are jittery about gas line work in other parts of the San Francisco bay Area, it has come to light that the utility doesn't always know where its lines are or how to shut them down in a timely manner. Regardless of the ultimate cuse of the disaster in San Bruno it is established that PG&E took more than an hour and a half to shut down that line.
One of the emerging issues is that there were missing some of the safety features in some gas lines, notably a valve that would automatically shut down a line that has pressure too high or too low. News out today is that the line had a pressure surge in it before the explosion. The line is 50+ years old, and it is only a few hundred feet from the San Andreas Fault at the explosion site although an earthquake did not cause the explosion.
Until a couple of days ago PG&E refused to let regulators or the public know where their large gas pipes run, claiming security concerns. They didn't offer to provide that information to their regulators, either, but now they have relented. Apart from the hysteria created by this explosion, at least the cities and emergemcy people need to know where those lines run, even if the security concerns are legitmate from a HLS point of view.
There may be another reason why PG&E is trying to withhold information, it is that their cost-cutting resulting in poor maintenence of their infrascructure, and the reliability of their other services to the public, will be scrutanized and acted upon to hit their bottom line. They already went to the Public Utilities Commission, their main regulator, to ask to pass on the cost of dealing with this mess, that their neglect has possibly created, to ask for a rate increase to their customers.
This mess occurs against the backdrop of other public controversaries concerning this utility, first and foremost was the $50 Million PG&E spent in the last state election to promote a iniative proposition, it mostly funded, to support its power to prevent local jurisdiction from going into the power business, if not off their grid. Maybe they should have spent the money on critical maintenence of those gas line, instead.
The defeat of this ballot proposal, which the public easily saw through as a ruse for the utility to get a monopoly in energy, resulted in a cutesy ad campaign claiming the the Utility was using alternative energy and offering it to the public. That is largely a bare faced lie. PG&E's grid is mostly designed to use traditional energy sources exclusively and new energy sources are but a couple of percent of what it supplies. For competition producing solar or other alternatives, would be mostly off grid, which is what the Utility is afarid of, really. A big problem of alternative energy is to expand the grid to get it to people to use it. Maybe local grids serving a particular area with locally generated alternative energy IS a partial solution. We will find out about this in the next state-wide natural disaster.
The other issue that damages PG&E's credibility and relates to cost-cutting and poor service issues, is the public relations nightmare it has created concerning Smart Meters, the digital alternative meters to the long in use mechanical analog meters that have been a fixture for several decades. The problem is that a few customers saw their bills double and more when PG&E replaced their old meters with Smart Meters. Now, it turns out that Smart Meters may actually help customers better manage their energy use, if not provide more reliable measurement of usage to the utility, but PG&E blew the opportunity by stonewalling on the issues of suddenly big bills and destroyed its credibility when the issues turned out to be real install errors. Now of course, at increased cost to them, they are trying to make up for this older disaster.
Without dwelling on the Infrastructure vulnerabilities the disaster has highlighted, people are not as concerned as they should be about seismic damage to this aging infrastructure. The issue about risk to us being increased by PG&E's financial priorities is real and cause enough to examine how we can get off or reduce our dependance on their infrastructure, exactly the thinking they tried to defeat through special interest politicing. It seems to have backfired, and they have their own mismanagement to blame for that.
When I had the problem with the display screens on my main Linux install on Ubuntu 8.10 on its own partition, I decided to try and see if the install by Wabi within the Windows Vista (NTFS) partition of Ubuntu 9.10. ( It would be wonderful to find that I could install other Linux distros in the same way: Boot with grub, make the root the directory in which the Linux image is installed on NTFS. ) The only issue I thought that this raised was that I couldn't see the rest of the Windows partition. As I was trying to deal with the screen resolution issue, it turns out that it didn't fix the problem, I noticed that the file manager could see the windows files, so the mount point for the full NTFS partition was available to the wabi install in a sub-dir of it.
Another finding is that the restored screen resolution can be compromised by
running Windows Apps under Wine inside Linux, that try to change screen
resolution or appearently don't do the right thing. In the one case where
this happened exiting out of Celestia 1.5 set the low res screen, It didn't
clobber the correct configuration in