A judge has ordered busted illegal marijuana cultivators to pay Pacific Gas & Electric Co. tens of thousands of dollars for bypassing the electric meters at their grow houses in Daly City and Oakland.Mon Chi Chan, 32, owes the utility company $42,000 and Menh Voong, 36, owes $13,117 after pleading no contest to charges related to grow house raids in June 2009, according to prosecutors. Read More
Officials with PG&E have reached their conclusion about what caused a natural-gas pipeline to explode in San Bruno last September. And they have concluded the event was not the utility’s fault.
Federal investigators asked PG&E, the agency that regulates it, the city of San Bruno and other parties to submit analyses about what caused and contributed to the San Bruno disaster, which took eight lives and decimated a neighborhood. Read More
An outage temporarily knocked out power to about 5,500 customers in the Sunset district, according to Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
A downed wire at 46th Avenue and Ortega Street caused the outage around 11:20 a.m., PG&E spokesman Joe Molica said.
PG&E crews repaired the problem and restored power to all customers just after noon, Molica said. Read More
Two decades ago, PG&E decided to replace the aging pipeline that ran through San Bruno. Its customers paid to do so. But it was never replaced. And it’s unclear where the money went.
Click on the photo at right to see a map of pipelines that run through the Glenview neighborhood in San Bruno.
An audit released Monday revealed that ratepayers paid PG&E about $183 million in the late 1980s and early 1990s for pipeline replacements that were never performed. Read More
Nearly eight months after 38 homes were scorched off the San Bruno map, city officials have started the Crestmoor neighborhood’s home-rebuilding program by issuing the first permit. Last week, longtime resident Bob Hensel became the first person to receive a rebuilding permit from the city following the Sept. 9 PG&E natural-gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people and destroyed dozens of homes. Read More
A settlement characterized by critics as a "backroom deal" between PG&E and its regulator was blasted in a hearing Monday, both for its content and how it came to be.
Among the harshest critics were members of the commission being asked to approve the deal next month. If they don’t do so, PG&E could be forced to defend itself against contempt charges. Read More
A power outage in San Francisco’s South of Market area affected more than 2,300 customers Wednesday afternoon.The outage was reported shortly after 2 p.m. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said areas impacted include First and Second Streets to Bryant and Townsend streets.
Several computers in The San Francisco Examiner newsroom shut off abruptly due to the outage. There were reports of traffic signals that had gone out as well. Read More
Funding for a popular San Francisco rebate program that has encouraged the installation of more than 1,200 solar projects may be cut from $5 million to $3 million. The two-year-old GoSolarSF is funded by revenue generated by the city-owned dam at Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. It has helped foster a local solar industry by providing rebates of $2,000 or more to residents and businesses going solar. Read More
Not long ago, the main complaints tenant counselors heard about CitiApartments were of harassment and intimidation.Now, the stories have changed: Today, tenants more often complain that they are being threatened with utility shutoffs, because neither the landlord nor the banks that own their properties have been paying the bills. Read More
A judge called this man a “piranha” before sentencing him to nearly three years in prison for posing as a San Bruno disaster victim in order to bilk financial aid.Daniel Leon Stansbury, 41, of Los Altos, was one of seven people charged with stealing aid intended for victims of the devastating Sept. 9 pipeline explosion. Read More
