Pacific Gas & Electric keeps a meter running on its homepage that tracks how many electric facilities it has inspected to date. When last updated on December 5, it was 1,913,880. The utility may have to adjust that number.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported last week that PG&E has hired 48 new inspectors to check more than 1,500 critical pieces of electrical equipment in Alameda County and the South Bay it believes employees skipped over and may have lied about. Eight company employees and 11 contract workers were suspended or fired.   

Some of the equipment is in the type of underground vaults that have been the sites of explosions and fires in San Francisco. California law requires that they be inspected every three years.

The utility has already performed thousands of re-inspections over the past few years.

PG&E said an employee tip back in 2010 led to some re-inspections of equipment that were completed by 2011, but in June of this year the problem was identified as being much larger than originally thought. The California Public Utilities Commission cited the utility for that inspection failure in October, the same month PG&E announced another 1,180 suspect “inspections.”

An investigation of the deadly 2010 PG&E gas pipeline explosion that leveled a San Bruno neighborhood revealed a history of inspection failures.

–Ken Broder

To Learn More:

PG&E Says Workers Lied about Inspections (by Jaxon Van Derbeken, San Francisco Chronicle)

Questions Raised about PG&E Underground Enclosures (by Heather Ishimaru, ABC News, San Francisco)