SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) today announced that it has completed the 10^th of 12 safety recommendations issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) following the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion. The NTSB granted “closed-acceptable action” status given the improvements the company has made on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and commended the company’s actions for exceeding the scope of the recommendation.

“We have fully embraced the NTSB’s safety recommendations as part of our progress toward becoming the safest, most reliable utility in America. We are committed to earning the trust and confidence of our customers by showing them that safety always comes first in everything we do," said PG&E President Chris Johns.

In 2014, PG&E opened a $38 million state-of-the-art Gas Control Center in San Ramon, Calif., that serves as the company’s hub for all natural gas SCADA activities. SCADA enables predictive pipeline safety monitoring and real-time data about the company’s natural gas system to significantly reduce the risk of a pipeline incident.

“Our team has made incredible progress on each NTSB recommendation. Using the SCADA technology with our sophisticated Gas Control Center, we’ve been able to move from an observe-and-respond approach to a predict-and-prevent approach to how we manage our gas system. There is still more work to be done, and our employees are working every day to close out the remaining two recommendations by creating a 21st-century gas system,” said Nick Stavropoulos, executive vice president of PG&E’s Gas Operations.

Since 2011, PG&E has made significant progress on improving the safety and reliability of its natural gas system and operations including:

• Becoming one of the first utilities in the world to achieve PAS 55-1: 2008 and ISO 55001: 2014 certifications for best-in-class asset management.
• Improving response time to gas odor reports to an average of 20 minutes, which represents the top decile for gas utilities nationally.
• Decommissioning all remaining cast-iron pipe in its system, replacing it with modern plastic pipe, which is more flexible and reliable during earthquakes, and newer steel pipe.
• Automating more than 200 valves, enabling remote-control shutoff of gas in an emergency.
• Replacing 127 miles of gas transmission pipeline.

The two remaining safety recommendations are in an “open-acceptable” status, according to the NTSB, showing that the company’s progress is appropriate and acceptable, pending completion.

B-Roll of PG&E Gas Control Center Available

About PG&E

Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a subsidiary of PG&E Corporation (NYSE:PCG), is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric utilities in the United States. Based in San Francisco, with more than 20,000 employees, the company delivers some of the nation’s cleanest energy to nearly 16 million people in Northern and Central California. For more information, visit www.pge.com/ and www.pge.com/en/about/newsroom/index.page.

http://www.pgecurrents.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pacificgasandelectric
https://twitter.com/pge4me
http://www.linkedin.com/company/pacific-gas-and-electric-company
http://www.youtube.com/user/pgevideo

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150520005369/en/

Source: Pacific Gas and Electric Company