Federal investigators placed the blame for a 2019 natural gas explosion in San Francisco's Richmond district at the feet of a local company's excavation crew for failing to follow safe excavation practices.
The National Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday released a report detailing how Kilford Engineering Inc.'s crew didn’t follow protocols, thus causing their excavation backhoe to strike a PG&E natural gas distribution pipeline on Feb. 6, 2019.
Nobody was injured in the explosion at Geary Blvd. and Parker Ave. that day, but about 100 people were evacuated a handful of buildings were damaged as flames rose around 50 feet in the air. Investigators estimated damages to the building and the pipeline system surpassed $10 million.
"This accident shows there are rules and procedures in place to ensure safe excavation; however, in this case, the construction crew chose not to abide by them," Robert Hall, Director of the agency’s Office of Railroad, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Investigations, said in a statement. "Consequently, the crew conducted mechanical excavation too close to the pipeline without taking the proper precautions first to make sure the area was safe to execute the dig."
Investigators also recommended that PG&E start incorporating location information into its software used to stop the flow of natural gas. The report said it took the utility 50 minutes to identify the location of the valves necessary to shut off the gas flow, increasing the risk to the surrounding neighborhood since the fire couldn’t be extinguished until its source was located.
The agency advised San Francisco police, fire and emergency officials to work with PG&E to coordinate responses to similar events in the future. PG&E was denied a police escort after asking an officer for one rather than calling 911 dispatch. That didn't result in a delayed response time, but the safety board said in its report that the utility didn’t follow its own procedures to ask for one.
Kilford Engineering, meanwhile, is set for a hearing with state regulators next week.
The company, which had been in business for fewer than four months and licensed for about three at the time of the incident, could lose its license and/ or be fined, depending on the result of a Contractors State License Board investigation. The state board accused the company last July of improperly following state law by not identifying the buried pipelines’ location with hand tools before excavating.
