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Federal panel's report blames PG&E for last year's deadly gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno, but other agencies come in for criticism too. In a scathing critique, federal investigators blamed Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for what one official called "baffling" mistakes that led to a gas pipeline explosion last September that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in the Bay Area last year.

PG&E said its chief executive will retire at the end of the month and it is conducting a search for a successor, a surprise change at a utility rocked by a series of setbacks. Peter Darbee, PG&E's chairman and chief executive, was brought in in 1999 as an outsider who would bring fresh ideas, but appears to have been felled by inattention to the bread-and-butter basics of the utility business: providing safe and reliable service to customers.

A vintage segment of gas pipeline that exploded earlier this month was not on a list of the Pacific Gas & Electric's top 100 risky pipeline segments, the president of the company said.

State regulators in 2007 gave Pacific Gas and Electric Co. the go-ahead to spend $5 million of ratepayer money to replace a 62-year-old section of the same pipeline that exploded last week in San Bruno.