San Bruno Pipeline Explosion
A San Bruno man who suffered serious injuries when a gas line exploded and spread flames through the Crestmoor neighborhood died Monday, making him the eighth fatality due to the Sept.
9 blast, the San Mateo County coroner said Tuesday.
James Emil Franco, 58, rented an upstairs room in a two-story home on Glenview Drive, located about 200 feet from where the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. natural gas transmission pipeline exploded. He was in his room when the blast occurred, said homeowner Jose Alvarado.
The section of gas pipeline that ruptured and exploded in a suburban San Francisco neighborhood, killing four and injuring nearly 60 others, was ranked as high risk because it ran through a highly populated area, state and federal authorities said Saturday.
One of the victims killed in the inferno Thursday worked for the commission reviewing Pacific Gas & Electric's investment plans to upgrade its natural gas lines, including another risky section of the same pipeline within miles of her home, a colleague confirmed.
Two days after a massive pipeline blast engulfed a Peninsula neighborhood in a hellish inferno, search teams made the grisly discovery of what appeared to be three more bodies in a home destroyed by the explosion, and new information surfaced about a 2008 sewer project that could have weakened the gas line.
While police officials Saturday evening declared the death toll had risen to seven, with six additional people still considered missing, late Saturday they would only say the coroner's office was testing "additional skeletal remains."
The gas line fire in San Bruno, California, that killed four people and destroyed 38 homes is now fully contained with small hot spots, Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado told reporters Friday. He said the search effort is about 75 percent complete.
The fire chief of San Bruno, California, told reporters Friday everyone is accounted for after a massive gas line fire there that killed four people.
The 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion occurred at 6:11 p.m. PDT on September 9, 2010, in San Bruno, California, a suburb of San Francisco, when a 30 inch steel natural gas pipeline owned by Pacific Gas & Electric exploded in flames in the Crestmoor residential neighborhood 2 mi (3.2 km) west of San Francisco International Airport near Skyline Boulevard and San Bruno Avenue. The loud roar and shaking led some residents of the area, first responders, and news media to initially believe that it was an earthquake or that a large airplane from nearby San Francisco International Airport had crashed. It took crews nearly an hour to determine it was a gas pipeline explosion. As of September 29, 2010, the death toll was eight people. USGS registered the explosion and resulting shock wave as a magnitude 1.1 earthquake. Eye witnesses reported the initial blast "had a wall of fire more than 1,000 feet high".
