California Personal Injury Law Case Notes : California Personal Injury Lawyer & Attorney : Kristine Meredith : The Danko Law Firm : Car Accidents & Product Liability

PG&E didn't document the fact that Line 132 had welded seams.  So really, what's the big deal? Aside from proving that PG&E is sloppy on its paperwork, what difference does make?

Plenty.

Back in 1998, the Department of Transportation sent out to all utilities, including PG&E, a Safety Alert (see below).  The Alert explained that pipes with welded seams (known as "ERW" pipes) are dangerous.  Special precautions need to be taken to make sure they don't explode. For example, the pipes should be periodically tested to make sure they are sound.

Because PG&E's paperwork said that the pipe was not ERW pipe, PG&E took none of the recommended safety precautions.

One of the problems with ERW pipe is that the welds are subject to a type of corrosion that is hard to detect.   According to the Alert:

ERW seams have been involved in 145 service failures . . .since 1970, and . . .all but 2 occurred on pipe manufactured prior to 1970. . .selective seam corrosion appears to  be a contributing cause of failure in a significant number of these incidents. . .

If the welded seam pipe was installed before 1970 (as was Line 132) the Alert called upon the utility to not just review the pipe's history, but to fill it with water and pressure test it to make sure it is sound.

All operators who have pre-1970 ERW pipe in their systems should carefully review their leak, failure, and test history as well as their corrosion control records. . .operators should consider hydrostatically testing to ensure the integrity of the pipeline.

It appears that PG&E neither conducted nor even considered hydrostatically testing Line 132, despite the fact that Line 132 was suspect pre-1970 ERW pipe. 

Did PG&E fail to properly document the type of pipe running through San Bruno due to a mere oversight?  Or did PG&E deliberately fail to document the pipe so that it wouldn't have to conduct the expensive and time consuming hydrostatic tests? 

Safety Alert re Welded Pipe

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Some estimate that automotive rear-enders cause about three million cervical injuries (a.k.a. "whiplash" injuries) in the U.S. each year. The injuries are real. According to the Insurance Research Council, the average payout for these injuries, which includes medical costs, lost wages, and pain and suffering, is around $8,000. Do the math. The potential cost of these injuries to insurance companies is an estimated $24 billion annually.

The insurance companies evade, avoid, and outright refuse to pay such costs.  In fact, to keep from paying, the insurance industry has developed a "no crash, no cash" policy. To keep from paying valid claims, the industry has created a fiction: if the vehicle is not damaged, then neither is the occupant.
 

Here are the tactics the industry uses to avoid paying:
 

• The insurance company tells the injured party: "Sorry, but we don’t believe injury is possible when the property damage is so low. We won’t pay." The patient has trouble finding an attorney because the attorney's percentage of the amount recovered (remember, it averages $8,000) is not worth his time and resources.
• If the victim finds an attorney, the attorney is often outmatched by the insurance company lawyers who are intent on ensuring that the attorney loses money on the case so that he'll never take another one.
• The insurance company lawyers will show a photo of the undamaged rear end of the car and tell the jury "This is a nonevent". The insurance company lawyers villainize the victim as a greedy plaintiff looking for a quick buck.
• The insurance company hires medical experts to spout their argument: "Injuries don't happen in low-speed impacts; if they do they are like bruises and will heal within six weeks".
• The insurance company supports an entire industry of accident reconstructionists and biomechanists who may impress the jury with their PhD’s; and at the same time bore them with one-sided research articles, complex mathematical formulas and contrived statistics.
• The victim's treating doctor, with limited courtroom experience, is ill-prepared to counter the insurance company's hired guns.
• The plaintiff lawyer may be uninformed about the insurance industries' prevailing strategy and unprepared to cross-examine the hired guns.

As a result, millions of folks who are injured due to no fault of their own go uncompensated by the insurance companies.  Never mind that the insurance companies collect premiums to pay exactly that sort of victim.
 

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More than 30 lawsuits have been filed in San Mateo County. Judge Steven Dylina was assigned to preside over the cases. Pursuant to his order, all the lawyers working on the cases met on December 2 to discuss amongst themselves how the cases should be handled. After that meeting, Judge Dylina set a first court date of December 21. 

A few lawsuits have also been filed in San Francisco County. PG&E asked that those cases be combined with the ones in San Mateo so that all the cases could be heard by the same judge. Judge Forcum of San Mateo County has been appointed to decide whether the San Francisco cases should be grouped with the San Mateo County cases and, if so, which judge should hear them.

Because Judge Forcum has not yet made his decision (that won’t come until January, at the earliest), on Thursday Judge Dylina cancelled the hearing set for December 21. Judge Dylina will set a new hearing date after Judge Forcum makes his ruling.

On Tuesday, the National Transportation Board said that the pipe that failed was welded together instead of being of seamless construction. This is important because PG&E’s documents said that the pipe was a seamless pipe, which is stronger than one that is welded. Furthermore, it looks as though at least one weld was missing. A missing weld, of course, would make the pipe even weaker. 

PG&E has yet to offer an explanation for why the pipe was welded when its documentation said that it was a stronger, seamless pipe.

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Array tomography is a state-of-the-art imaging system invented by Stanford University researchers. It allows researchers to count the myriad connections between nerve cells, as well as to catalog those connections’ surprising variety.

A typical healthy human brain contains about 200 billion nerve cells, or neurons, linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of tiny contacts called synapses. It is at these synapses that an electrical impulse traveling along one neuron is relayed to another, either enhancing or inhibiting the likelihood that the second nerve will fire an impulse of its own. One neuron may make tens of thousands of synaptic contacts with other neurons, said Stephen Smith, PhD, senior author of a paper published Nov. 18 in Neuron.

The new imaging system allows researchers to “travel” through the 3-D mosaic of neurons and observe different colors corresponding to different synaptic types just as a voyager might transit outer space and note the different hues of the stars dotting the infinite blackness. And to make a movie of the whole trip.  

This level of detailed visualization has never been achieved before. “The entire anatomical context of the synapses is preserved. You know right where each one is, and what kind it is. Observed in this manner, the brain’s overall complexity is almost beyond belief", said Smith. “One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor —with both memory-storage and information-processing elements — than a mere on/off switch. In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth,” he said.

Researchers plan to use array tomography to tease out more such distinctions within classes of synapses. That should accelerate neuroscientists’ progress in, for example, identifying the synapses that are lost after traumatic brain injury, or in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s.

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Are business owners or landlords responsible to those injured due to the criminal acts of third parties? Sometimes. Because of the “special relationship” a California business owner has with its customers, the owner or landlord must take reasonable steps to keep the premises safe against foreseeable criminal acts of others. In determining whether the owner must compensate the victim for his injuries, courts consider:

• the type of crime committed
• the type of commercial property (for example the owner of a parking garage will likely have a greater responsibility for safety than a business owner in a shopping center)
• Whether the owner had notice of any previous criminal conduct
• whether the owner had any reason to anticipate the type of criminal conduct that actually occurred
• whether the owner could have discovered that criminal acts were being committed on the property
• whether the owner has hired security guards
• whether the security guard acted reasonably at the time of the criminal act
• whether the criminal act occurred on property under the owner’s control
• whether the owner had any formal security policies
• whether the owner’s employees complied with the stated policy

Several of these factors relate to whether the owner had notice of prior criminal acts and how it responded to those acts. Unless a victim reports the criminal act to the property owner, the business owner or landlord may never learn of it, even if the police responded. To allow the owner an opportunity to correct the security issues before someone is hurt, it is important to always report security issues directly to the owner, and not just to law enforcement.  

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