I. INTRODUCTION
On December 20, 2003, a fire in Pacific Gas and Electric Company's (PG&E's) Mission Substation caused an outage to more than 100,000 customers throughout San Francisco, including downtown retail stores filled with shoppers on a peak holiday shopping weekend. PG&E and the Commission's Consumer Protection and Safety Division (CPSD) have completed independent investigations into the causes of the fire1.
The immediate cause of the fire was an electric cable failure. However, a single electric cable failure, by itself, should not cause an outage to over 100,000 customers. The investigations determined that other factors contributed to the catastrophic nature of the outage - for example, PG&E had not installed smoke detectors despite its own root cause analysis in the aftermath of a previous fire at the same Mission Substation that recommended that smoke detectors should be installed; PG&E's operators did not have appropriate information to evaluate the alarm, which caused them to take no action for two hours; PG&E did not have written procedures for coordinating emergency fire response with the fire department; the surrounding insulation materials were flammable; and auxiliary equipment that did not have to be energized was in fact energized and short-circuited, causing the fire. Had PG&E followed the recommendations made in the fire report from the 1996 Mission Substation fire, the outage would not have occurred.
The Commission finds that PG&E's failure to implement the recommendations from the previous fire investigation at the Mission Substation jeopardized system reliability and safety. Public Utilities Code section 451 requires that public utilities maintain their equipment and facilities in a safe and reliable manner. The Commission initiates this proceeding in order to consider whether to adopt the evidence set forth in the outage and fire reports, and issues an order to PG&E to appear and show cause why the Commission should not make a finding that PG&E violated Public Utilities Code section 451 by allowing an unsafe condition to exist at the Mission Substation, and impose appropriate fines and sanctions.
The Commission is deeply concerned by PG&E's failure to implement changes in response to known safety hazards at the Mission Substation, and finds that good cause exists to consider safety and reliability at PG&E's other indoor substations. We will require PG&E to provide a status report on the safety enhancements made at PG&E's indoor substations. If the Commission finds that PG&E's maintenance and/or operations practices at other indoor substations are unsafe, unreasonable, improper, or insufficient, we may order PG&E to change or improve its maintenance, operations, or construction standards for substations, to ensure system-wide safety and reliability.
