What a conflation!

The San Bruno explosion has nothing to do with fracking. I thought it might be an act of sabotage until I read that residents in the area had very recently complained about a strong natgas odor that was looked into, but obviously not solved.

is this article to make the EPA appear 'toothed', so as to give future compromises more apparent legitimacy than one might grant them, otherwise?

The root cause of this disaster is the excessive reliance the US in general, and California, in particular, on the burning of natural gas for space heating and the heating of hot water, in a supposedly "clean energy" application.

First of all, it contains carbon, so it's not exactly "clean", only less dirty than fuel oil, it's fossil alternative. If heating is done by using electricity, this is extremely dirty (heat pumps--less so), because coal is used to generate much of the electricity--50% of it on average in the US.

For California, the solution is clear, as it is in most other places, with the possible exception of the cloudy, northwest US.

Use "solar thermal" technology for heating in lieu of burning natural gas. A neighborhood could be retrofitted with a common underground thermal storage facility, initially to heat hot water, and later be extended to space heating.

By reducing the "demand" for natural gas, PG&E could reduce the pressure in their pipelines passing under residential neighborhoods and proportionally reduce the danger they represent.

You won't see PG&E accepting this idea any time soon, however--they're in the business of "pushing" natural gas use in the state, as well as are their "brother companies" elsewhere in the country.

Fracking is unregulated? What a surprise. Blowing water, sand, diesel fuels and other solvents into the ground can't really be that dangerous, now, can it? There are stories in New York as well, of aquifers contaminated by fracking. With this gas pipe blowing up, and the underground leak near Chicago, following the catastrophic Gulf gusher, maybe it's time for a serious look at the energy industry - including nukes. Oh. Skip it. It's an election year.

High presure gas transmission pipelines rupture and explode from time to time.

It has happened twice in my memory along the three to four , 24-30 inch Columbia tanscontinental pipelines where they cross through NE West Virginia and northern Virginia. The thermal effect of the rupture and fireball can be a small nuclear weapon. In one case, the heat of the fireball defoliated the trees across the hollow more than a half mile away. In both instances it was in a remote area and no one was hurt. The pipelines unfortunately pass through a couple favorite hiking areas of mine and I am alway a bit nervious when hiking along them.

Once we had to drill some test borings through a 4-foot gap between a pair of 30 inch 950 psi buried lines at a compressor station with possible foundation problems - along this same pipeline route in central Kentucky. They could blow down (depressurize) one of the lines, but we had to be damn sure we didn't hit the other line. A rigidly braced stack is mounted to blow down valve. A horn sounds and everyone on the site puts on hearing protection. One of the workers goes to the stack, flips a switch, then runs away as fast as he can. The valve gradually throttles open emiting a deafening roar like a space shuttle launch and a massive white jet of condensed methane and water vapor reaching 1000 feet into the sky. They must have wasted enough gas doing that to heat my house for 1000 winters.

The tragedy in San Bruno was not because of fracking--it was about GREED, the same thing that is causing the economic collapse of our economic system. The gas explosion in San Bruno was due to lack of maintenance of the pipe line.

People had been complaining that they could smell gas for three weeks before the explosion. The pipe line is owned by and maintained by a major profit making corporation named Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E). This corporation, like most large corporations, is infested with rampant greed.

During this depression they are laying off workers to increase their profits. Workers are so threatened by job loss that they work longer and harder as others are laid off. The corporations, since the death of labor unions, have been hiring new workers at less than they pay the current employees and offering the older experienced workers early retirement. This causes a lowing of standards of the maintenance of the equipment. It was this greed of the big boys that caused the tragedy.

They will of course do all they can to limit their liability for the damage done. Maybe they will blame it on Muslims or illegal immigrants.

Is it the industry or PGE? An article on the Huff Post says the pipeline was repaired two years ago with the wrong kind of pipe.
Americans are told they have short memories but none are as short as Lisa Jackson's. We pay her for having a better one.
PG&E's name used to be Enron/PG&E. Remember "Get Shorty" and "Richochet"? That's PG&E. The artificial brown outs that stampeded local utilities into signing contracts at exhorbitant rates? That's PG&E.
Never, never let your public utility go private.
Never blame an entire industry for privatly owned rotten apples.

"The natural gas industry is coming under intense scrutiny today...." Blah, blah, blah.

Oh, yeah? So what? Our sell-out president in The Whore, er, I mean White House and the lying, thieving criminals in the Congress will spout some platitudes, PG&E will throw some money around and it's back to business as usual.

AVE_fan wrote:
"Strange that solar technology is most widely applied in Germany which is a place for it just as "unlikely" as the regions you cite, isn't it?"

It's well-known that the takeup of solar in Germany was due to a large part in Government solar power buy-backs and so on. That strategy was designed to not only promote solar power usage but to also create a rapid uptake and useage of the technology which Germany rightly sees as being able to be used in greening their power supplies and to lessen reliance on oil.

But in reality Germany is much less suitable to solar-only power than in many other parts of the world due to their climate. (Climate disruption trends notwithstanding.)

Nobody should be just putting their eggs in one basket with regards to clean energy be it solar, wind, tidal and soon. But at least Germany has shown the world that solar is not a boogeyman to be feared just as Spain showed it also with it's big solar power station(s), even though they're still small by other fossil-fuel/nuclear standards in output.

I'm all for sustainable green power but the suitable applicable uptake of such appropriate methods in countries where it would do superbly (solar in Australia for instance) is often woefully poor if not ridiculous when compared to other countries who have forged far ahead.

Australia has (supposedly) huge gas reserves that are being drilled and used, so much so that gigantic quantities are literally shipped to other countries such as China who negotiated a contract to buy it for a relatively pittance for many years to come.

Industrial Western Australia was half-crippled by a gas supply explosion in 2008.
2008 Western Australian gas crisis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Western_Australian_gas_crisis

In that time I read in their news that the government even appealed to householders to cut down their gas useage so 'more could go around' (for industrial use really but they never openly said that), and that many industrial places were forced to have layoff's and 'holiday' periods because of no supplies of gas or because of commercial on-flow problems from other companies who were suffering.

All this was a clear example of how one single solitary incident (the explosion and cutting of the gas line in a remote part of Australia) could seriously affect not only industrial supplies but also for ordinary people though it never quite came down the to the latter. It also shows how a reliance upon a finite resource will have a detrimental affect in the not too distant future, one which the governments here of all followings other than the Greens are willfuly ignoring, instead having faith that oil will always be plentiful and that Australia has large reserves of coal.

It's all about money and not reality or sustainability, let alone anything else like causing ongoing climate disruption or the outright health detriments.

BTW, the costs of power supply here in Australia has been skyrocketting but still the all-smothering embrace of oil and coal has a stranglehold on all parts of government who don't want to do anything to upset those industries but they occasionally give token support for half-baked projects or strategies they know are designed to fail time and again and will be abandoned.

Perhaps our country's infrastructure in crumbling, I mean the USG has destroyed the infrastructures, by bombing, of other countries the cost of which would be better used by keeping the infrastructure is good repair here, rather than destroying say the infrastructure in Iraq, then funding to fix it and shockingly that money disappears ending up in Dubai, mysteriously of course.

The nature of publicly regulated private utilities is to go short on safety whenever it's not regulated, and to pay off the public utilities commission and the state legislature to go easy on the oversight in critical areas.

This is why 50 house explosions and LNG tanker explosions are inevitable. This is why the BP blowout was inevitable. This is why nuclear meltdowns such as Three Mile Island are inevitable.

Also, when private utilities are paid as a percentage of what they spend, private utilites try to goldbrick everything. If they use solid gold utility poles, they make more profits for their stockholders

1.I've heard no reference to fracking having anything to do with this explosion.
2.While several people have said, "I smelled gas," as of now, there is no documentation of anybody having reported it. PG&E has no record of a call since at least the beginning of September, and no individual has come forth to say, "I called PG&E to report it." Considering there is a record of every call we make these days on our cell phones, this is easily confirmed and is being investigated.
3.The infrastructure across our entire country is crumbling. Remember the bridge collapse in Minnesota a few years ago? Or the recent water system failure in Boston? Read the "report card" by the American Society of Civil Engineers http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/
The cost to repair all of the problems - at least $2.2 trillion. Just think - we spent several times that in Iraq. We have nothing to show for that. And our infrastructure will continue to collapse, fail, and explode. Our country's priorities have been wrong for years.
4.This is a massively huge tragedy for the entire region around San Bruno, and especially for the people who lost everything they have, regardless of what happened or whose fault it is. I am so so sad for all of them.