The Californian utility company made infamous by the film Erin Brockovich is facing a $1.4 billion penalty over a gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people in a suburb of San Francisco four years ago.
Pacific Gas & Electric has been accused of 3,800 violations over deficient and ineffective safety management by the California Public Utilities Commission, which said that the financial penalty was the biggest it had ever levied.
More than three dozen homes were destroyed when a 30-inch transmission line ruptured in San Bruno, near San Francisco’s international airport.
In a legal battle dramatised in a Hollywood film starring Julia Roberts, the company lost a courtroom fight two decades ago with an environmental activist who accused Pacific Gas & Electric of poisoning the water supply for a small California town, Hinkley, over a 30-year period.