PG&E’s ‘shady’ conduct hindered probe, investigators say

Federal investigators complained that secret meddling, arrogance and “shady” conduct on the part of Pacific Gas and Electric Co. hindered their probe into the deadly San Bruno gas pipeline explosion, according to new court filings that shed light on prosecutors’ decision to seek a criminal obstruction-of-justice case against the company.

“PG&E really stood out as a company that was not forthcoming and lacked cooperation,” Ravi Chhatre, lead investigator in the San Bruno case for the National Transportation Safety Board, told a team of federal investigators and prosecutors last year, the documents show.

Federal prosecutors interviewed Chhatre in July 2014 as part of their investigation after the company had already been indicted on pipeline-safety charges in connection with the blast, which killed eight people and leveled 38 homes.

Later that month, a grand jury amended the indictment to add more pipeline-safety counts and one count of obstructing the safety board’s investigation into the September 2010 explosion.

The obstruction charge accuses PG&E of misleading investigators by disowning a 2008 document that outlined a scheme for avoiding costly pipeline inspections after gas-pressure surges, in apparent defiance of federal law.

Last week, the utility asked U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson to throw out the case — and, in a strange twist, accompanied its court filing with with summaries of the federal interviews with Chhatre and other National Transportation Safety Board investigators who criticized the company’s conduct during the San Bruno probe.

Legal arguments aside, the interviews show that the relationship between PG&E and federal investigators during the probe was hostile from the start.

Chhatre complained that PG&E employees were “giggling, laughing and were sarcastic” during interviews he conducted four months after the explosion, according to a summary prepared by Lisa Glazzy, an investigator with the U.S. Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General.

Another safety board investigator, Matt Nicholson, told the prosecution team that PG&E had adopted a defensive, condescending and sarcastic attitude, and that the company was responsible for creating a “toxic atmosphere” around the probe.

“He felt as though the PG&E attorneys were trying to stop things, and the NTSB was not getting real information from them,” an investigator with the San Mateo County district attorney’s office, Rich Maher, wrote after the team interviewed Nicholson in November 2014.

Nicholson said “that in other investigations conducted by the NTSB the involved parties have been tough, but in this case there appeared to be a problem with the culture at PG&E,” Maher wrote.

In response to the accusations, PG&E released a statement Friday saying it does not believe its employees intentionally violated federal law, and that “even where mistakes were made, employees were acting in good faith.”

Chhatre, however, said the interview was a breach of PG&E’s agreement with the federal investigators not to conduct its own interviews without safety board officials being there.

San Bruno City Manager Connie Jackson, the city’s official representative to the safety board probe, said she was not surprised that the federal investigators had complained about PG&E to prosecutors after completing their work.