Crews Search San Bruno Homes After Blast Kills 4
SAN BRUNO (CBS 5 / KCBS / AP / BCN) - Fire crews doused the remnants of an enormous six-alarm blaze and tried to account for the residents of dozens of homes Friday after a gas line ruptured and an explosion ripped through a San Bruno neighborhood, killing at least four people and posibly more.
Federal officials were also attempting to determine what led to Thursday evening's blast that raised questions about the safety of similar gas lines that criss-cross towns across America.
Crews with dogs went house to house in the crowded Crestmoor Canyon neighborhood on Friday, and officials said there could be more casualties. Homes were left with just chimneys standing and smoke still rose from blocks of smoldering wreckage.
"It was pretty devastating," said San Bruno Fire Chief Dennis Haag. "It looks like a moonscape in some areas."
The deadly blast was so powerful that it registered Thursday evening as a magnitude 1.3 earthquake on the seismograph at the U.S. Geological Survey's Menlo Park office, USGS scientist David Oppenheimer told CBS 5.
Haag said fire crews still were not able to access the site of the ruptured gas line on Friday because it was covered with water. He also indicated that a quarter of the homes burned by the ensuing blaze were still too hot to search.
Police blocked people from approaching the burn area on Friday, saying it was being treated as a crime scene until investigators could determine a cause of the explosion. One man was arrested for allegedly looting a home.
"We have go through that area and make sure there aren't any items to suggest foul play, then we can continue on with our recovery efforts and getting people back into their homes," San Bruno Police Chief Neil Telford said.
Antonette Vaccari, a San Bruno resident for more than 50 years, said she was unsure if her house near Skyline Boulevard and San Bruno Avenue was still standing and officials wouldn't give her an estimate for when she could see it.
"Everybody keeps saying, 'It is, it is, it is' standing but I don't know. We always hope for the best," Vaccari said. "If it's still standing I'm sure it's pretty much smoke damaged."
A line of cars Friday gathered near the intersection of Skyline Boulevard and Sneath Lane, one of the better vantage points to see the damage wrought by the fire; some people took pictures.
Officials confirmed that four people where killed when the gas line ruptured and a fireball exploded through the group of homes.
Two of the victims, a mother and daughter, were identified late Friday by the San Mateo County coroner's office as 44-year-old Jacqueline Greig and 13-year-old Janessa Greig.
Jacqueline Greig worked at the California Public Utilities Commission and lived with her daughter in a house just yards from the source of the blast.
Greig was survived by her elderly parents, husband and older daughter, according to an e-mail sent on behalf the family.
The family members have "suffered greatly through this ordeal and
have also been devastated by this loss," said Jacqueline Greig's father, Agustin Macedo of San Francisco.
Another victim was identified as 20-year-old Jessica Morales, but the coroner's office was still working to identify the fourth victim.
The fire chief said Friday that there was no indication that anyone remained unaccounted for, and he called the lack of missing person reports "very encouraging."
"I don't want to find any more people," Haag said of sifting through the rubble and debris. "It's unfortunate we lost anyone."
At least 52 people were hurt, with eight in critical condition at Bay Area hospitals. The explosion left a giant crater and sent flames tearing through the middle-class neighborhood of 1960s-era homes in hills overlooking San Francisco Bay and San Francisco International Airport.
Christina Veraflor, 41, of Napa, grew up in the neighborhood and said that her 67-year-old mother's house was destroyed. Her mother, who had lived in the home for 40 years, was at the movies when the neighborhood erupted in flames.
"I woke up this morning and said, 'I'll go to my mom's and get this and get that.' But there is no mom's anymore," Veraflor said.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. President Chris Johns said that a 30-inch diameter steel gas pipe ruptured about three feet underground just after 6 p.m. Thursday, but crews still had not been able to determine the cause of the rupture and blast because they couldn't get close enough. The damaged section of high-pressure pipe, which could be as old as 50 years, was isolated and gas flow to the area had been stopped.
"We're really saddened and sorry about this tragedy," Johns said.
The blaze charred 15 acres of land and was fully contained on Friday afternoon, fire officials said, up from 50 percent containment overnight.
Veraflor said she smelled gas at the house during a visit six weeks ago but did not report the smell to the utility.
"You'd get a whiff of it, and it would dissipate," she said.
Johns said the company had heard the reports that some residents smelled gas in the area before the blast.
"Right now, we haven't got confirmation about that, but we have records that we are going back right this minute to try to confirm what exactly those phone calls look like and when they occurred, and we will report back as soon as we know something," he said.
State Assemblyman Jerry Hill, who represents San Bruno, said he too heard reports from constituents who had alerted the utility of gas odors in the neighborhood before the disaster.
Residents "deserve to know if PG&E used the correct procedures in the days and weeks leading up to this disaster," he said.
After the initial blast, flames reached as high as 100 feet as the fire fueled itself on burning homes, leaving some in total ruins and reducing parked automobiles to burned out hulks.
"It was a continuous whooshing sound as if it was a fed fire," resident Michael Yost said. "It sounded like, you know, you would if you had a blow torch. It's that sound but, you know, a hundred times louder."
"Someone thought it was an asteroid," said Jean Edge, a resident of Shelter Creek Condominiums, which are just over one mile from the blast scene. "We heard the explosion and then saw the flames go up."
The mood was apprehensive at the evacuation center Friday, where several dozens of people came to get information and services.
Carlene Vasquez did not know what happened to her house and was anxiously waiting for news when her son came up and showed her a picture of her house, still standing, on his mobile phone.
"Oh my house," she said, crying. "That's my house."
Four firefighters suffered minor smoke inhalation injuries and were treated and quickly released, according to Haag.
The fire chief and federal officials said crews walked through the neighborhood on Friday and revised the damage estimate to 37 structures destroyed and eight significantly damaged. In all, authorities said they saw about 170 houses that had suffered some degree of damage in the sweeping fire.
"As devastating as this was, it could have been so much worse in my opinion," Haag said. "We made a terrific effort in stopping the fires in the way we did."
It's not the first time a deadly explosion on a PG&E gas line has devastated a Northern California neighborhood.
On Christmas Eve 2008 an explosion killed a 72-year-old man in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova, destroyed one home and seriously damaged others.
The National Transportation Safety Board's final report said PG&E used a wrong pipe to repair the gas line two years before the explosion. Rancho Cordova residents had reported of a gas smell in the area before the blast.
In response to the NTSB's findings, the company said it had taken "extraordinary measures" to ensure a blast like that would never happen again.
PG&E's Johnson maintained the San Bruno explosion was not connected to an underground fire in a PG&E electrical vault Friday morning at San Francisco's Montgomery and Sutter streets, the latest in a series of underground vault fires in San Francisco in recent years.
"I can't accept another utility failure...the next morning (after the explosion), that's along the same pattern" as the previous underground problems, said San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. A similar problem at Polk and O'Farrell streets in June 2009 sent a 20-foot fireball into the air.
The NTSB sent an eight-member team to San Bruno to investigate Thursday's blast.
"My immediate assessment was the amazing destruction: the charred trees, the area that was completely flattened," vice chairman Christopher Hart said. "It was just an amazing scene of destruction."
A portion of the pipeline that exploded was found a great distance from the hole it flew out of, which "tells me the magnitude of the explosion that took place," Hart said.
When asked if that magnitude was unusual, Hart replied, "In explosions, nothing is unusual."
The NTSB investigators will work to "not just understand what happened, but why it happened," Hart added, and would then submit recommendations to help prevent such disasters in the future.
He estimated it would be 14 to 18 months before a final report was completed.
The pipeline involved in the accident is under the jurisdiction of the California Public Utility Commission. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said an official from his department would be on the scene "to make sure things are being done correctly."
"We are going to take 24/7 oversight to make sure everything is done correctly, LaHood told reporters in Washington, D.C.
However, LaHood added: "The responsibility for this falls under the state of California."
The NTSB, an independent federal agency, investigates pipeline accidents. The U.S. Transportation Department, which includes the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, regulates pipeline safety.
California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, acting governor while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was in Asia on a trade mission, declared a state of emergency in San Mateo County.
"Without warning, many of these people's lives have been changed forever and my deepest prayers go out to everyone," Maldonado said.
The Federal Emergency Management Administration made disaster relief funds available to cover 75 percent of the cost of fighting the San Bruno blaze. The money covers equipment, supplies and emergency work such as evacuations, shelter and traffic control.
U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier said that federal officials were also working to secure additional federal emergency funds.
"We will all come together," Speier said. "We will once again see San Bruno thriving."
Insurance adjusters estimated the total extent of property losses could reach into in the tens of millions of dollars.
"You've heard the numbers, but what we have to deal with in the immediate future is the stress, the anxiety, the uncertainness in the minds of those that have been affected," San Bruno Mayor Jim Ruane said.
According to city manager Connie Jackson, some blocks were harder hit than others. The damage was the most serious on the 1600 and 1700 blocks of Claremont Drive; the 900 block of Glenview Drive; the 1700 block of Earl Avenue; the 1100 block of Fairmont Drive; and the 2700 block of Concord Way.
Significant sections of the neighborhood had been deemed safe for residents to return to, said Jackson, who stressed that evacuated residents should still check in with the Red Cross at Veterans Memorial Recreation Center at 251 City Park Way.
She said the Red Cross' Safe and Well program allows evacuees to check in and let family and friends know they are safe.
To register for the program online, evacuees can go to https://safeandwell.communityos.org/cms. People trying to locate family members or other loved ones can also use the website to see if they have checked in.
People without Internet service can call the San Bruno Parks and Recreation Department at (650) 616-7180 to check in, and a city employee will pass the information along to the Red Cross.
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