Yesterday, NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman visited the site of the San Bruno gas pipeline blast. Congresswoman Jackie Speier, introducing Hersman, called the area an “open wound.”
Hersman revealed yesterday that PG&E had waited until only recently to inform the NTSB that the pipeline that ruptured at a defective weld last year, causing a fire that killed nine people and destroyed 38 homes, had previously leaked at a similar weld in 1988.
KGO has put up raw video of the entire event. To skip Herman’s preliminary comments and go to questions from the media, fast forward to 9:40 of the video.
The first questions concern PG&E’s delay of sharing information about the previous leak. Hersman said the agency was still collecting information about how serious the leak was. She said this type of information had been requested at the beginning of the investigation, and that “we certainly would have expected to see that earlier in the process.”
Why the delay?