California regulators imposed the largest penalty for a U.S. natural-gas utility, ordering PG&E Corp. to pay $1.6 billion for failures that led to a deadly 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion in a San Francisco suburb, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. A faulty weld on the pipeline caused an explosion and fire rupture that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno, Calif. PG&E, owner of the state’s largest utility, committed 2,425 violations of safety rules in the decades leading up to the incident. The company still faces as much as $1.13 billion in federal criminal fines for the blast and has committed to spend $2.8 billion to improve pipeline safety. The San Francisco-based company had warned that an earlier staff-proposed fine of $2.25 billion would push it to the edge of bankruptcy. Since the tragedy, PG&E has replaced its chief executive officer, frozen its dividend and separated its gas business from its power operations to improve safety.
