Gas Pipe Explosion, Pg&e | featured news

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.

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.