The San Bruno pipeline explosion (the case in our first lecture)occurred at 6:11 pm PDT on September 9, 2010, in San Bruno,California, a suburb of San Francisco, when a 30-inch (76 cm)diameter steel natural gas pipeline owned by Pacific Gas &Electric (PG&E) exploded into flames in the Crestmoorresidential neighborhood 2 mi (3.2 km) west of San FranciscoInternational Airport near Skyline Boulevard and San BrunoAvenue.

“The (investigation) report concluded that poor pipeline weldswent undetected because of a lack of inspections by the company andinadequate monitoring by state and federal regulators. The utilityalso lacked a workable emergency response plan that board memberssaid could have helped to prevent the devastation in the city ofSan Bruno.”

\"This represents a failure of the entire system — a system ofchecks and balances that should have prevented this disaster,\" saidRobert L. Sumwalt, an NTSB board member. \"The seam weld may havebeen the technical reason, but this was an organizationalaccident.\"

“Even though PG&E is a Local Distribution Company (LDC), agas utility - and not primarily a midstream company - there wereplenty of lessons to be learned by everyone, upstream, downstream,and all points in between. The investigation showed a myriad ofevents that led up to the catastrophe but a huge discovery was thatPG&E and subsequently, many LDC's in the US, could not locateadequate records of their pipelines. Some did not even haveemergency plans in place. Important records that were missingincluded type of pipe, when and where the line was installed,welding inspection reports, coating reports, in-line inspectionhistories, operating pressure changes, and more. All this data iscritical to correctly operating and maintaining a steel pipeline.It was learned that some LDC's could not even locate some of theirpipeline assets!”

Based on the above description and your knowledge about“Pipeline Integrity Management”, please :

1) identify the problems in the PG&E’s pipeline managementfrom above description;

2) give your recommendations (at least FOUR items) to thePG&E to prevent similar failures happen again in thefuture.