So this is weird. I was poking around on the National Pipeline Safety Mapping System website today, which is administered by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration, looking for information relating to the San Bruno pipeline explosion. When I ran a search for gas pipeline operators in San Francisco, two different names cropped up: The first is a gas technician who works for Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and the second, also listed as a PG&E contact, is local environmental justice advocate Francisco Da Costa. Wait, what?
Da Costa is a well-known figure at city hall who frequently speaks up during public comment at Board of Supervisors meetings. He’s the director of a Bayview organization called Environmental Justice Advocacy, and he blogs about local political issues on his website. When he speaks of PG&E, he tends to use phrases like “diabolical.” Da Costa wears several hats, but PG&E gas pipeline operator certainly isn’t one of them. Not only is he incorrectly identified as such in this federal search engine, complete with his email address and phone number, his name is tagged with the phrase “San Bruno Natural Gas Line” — virtually the only subject a member of the public would be on that website to collect information about.
Da Costa told me this headache started when he submitted an information request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that is conducting an investigation to determine the cause of the San Bruno gas-pipeline rupture. Somehow, in the course of processing his public-records request, it appears that the government wound up incorrectly listing him as a gas operator with PG&E. He’s notified them of the error, but as of this afternoon, it hadn’t been corrected.
Ironically, Da Costa’s request for information on the San Bruno pipeline prompted other info-seekers to contact him. “Ever since I initiated a FOIA request, fire chiefs have emailed me saying to provide them with the maps of the pipelines and so on and so forth,” he said. “I’ve received about 15 or 20 emails from fire chiefs all over California. I had to tell them, I’m not a gas operator.”
When we phoned the National Pipeline Mapping System to ask how Da Costa wound up being a listed as a PG&E pipeline operator, a spokesperson said she would check into it and call us back.