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$1.4 Billion in Penalties Is Sought in California Gas Blast

Flames tore through San Bruno, Calif., in 2010 in a natural gas explosion that killed eight people and injured dozens more.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Four years after a natural gas explosion tore through a neighborhood of San Bruno, Calif., killing eight people and injuring dozens of others, some of them seriously, the Pacific Gas & Electric Company has been hit with a proposed $1.4 billion penalty for suspected safety violations.

It is the largest safety penalty proposed to the California Public Utilities Commission.

In the decisions announced on Tuesday, a pair of administrative law judges said that the company committed 3,798 violations of state and federal laws, rules, standards or regulations in connection with its pipeline.

Under the proposal, still subject to the approval of the commission, the bulk of the proposed penalty, $950 million, will go into the state’s general fund, while $400 million will pay for pipeline improvements and about $50 million to enhance pipeline safety.

The deadly explosion in 2010 raised concerns about the care and maintenance of underground pipelines as the use of natural gas has boomed as a coal alternative.

The utility has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars settling claims by the victims and their families and contributing to the recovery efforts in San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco, where the gas and electric company is based.

PG&E also faces charges by federal prosecutors in San Francisco, who earlier this year accused the company of “knowingly and willfully” violating the Pipeline Safety Act and of obstructing a federal investigation into the explosion.

The company, which has said the prosecutor’s charges are not warranted, can appeal the commission’s ruling.

“We are accountable and fully accept that a penalty of some kind is appropriate,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “However, we have respectfully asked that the commission ensure that the penalty is reasonable and proportionate and takes into consideration the company’s investments and actions to promote safety.”

The judges’ lengthy rulings detail the terrifying explosion, problems with the gas company’s response to the blast and its efforts in the years leading up to the accident to cut costs.

The pipeline exploded in the Crestmoor section of San Bruno on the evening of Sept. 9, 2010, with such force that it dug a 72-foot-long crater and tossed a 3,000-pound section of pipe 100 feet. The blaze eventually consumed three dozen houses and forced a mass evacuation. It took more than 95 minutes for the utility company to isolate the break and shut off the gas.

“The Crestmoor neighborhood was effectively wiped off the map,” the administrative law judge Timothy J. Sullivan wrote in his ruling.

The rulings in California on Tuesday echoed earlier findings by officials from the National Transportation Safety Board, which traced the problems to the installation of the pipeline in 1956. Over the years, the investigators said, PG&E failed to properly inspect the finished product or grossly misinterpreted the results.

For years, the company also failed to maintain records or assess risk or to learn from other recent accidents, the safety board found in a 2011 report.

Federal investigators also placed some of the blame on the utilities commission for “failure to detect the inadequacies” of the PG&E’s monitoring process.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: $1.4 Billion in Penalties Is Sought in Gas Blast. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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