HANC President James Sword, center, and Haight Ashbury Merchants Association  Board Member Christin Evans, (left of James)  joined by representatives  of ProSF, Alamo Square Neighborhood Associatio , and North of Panhandle Neighborhood  Association at an October 26th Press Conference, calling on Supervisor Breed to conduct a hearing on five recent Haight Street gas leaks.

James Sword, President of the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council, called upon the Board of Supervisors to hold a hearing on a series of five gas leaks that occurred in one block of Haight Street between April and October which resulted in three evacuations of both businesses and residents, two “pauses” in the project to sort out the problem, and its final postponement in mid-October.  The project is still not completed and there are no known dates for its final completion.

Sword stated at the October 26th press conference that “the total disregard for public safety and local businesses …has been insulting and the root of why these utility breaches occurred is important… It is unacceptable that there have been conflicting accounts from the contractor, PG&E and the City  as to what has happened in each of these incidents…We feel that there is something more than just the subcontractor's errors…we want answers from DPW, the City Administrator (which directly manages DPW) and PG&E.”

HANC proposed to Supervisor Breed that she set a public hearing unprecedented failure of the project to answer the following specific questions:

1. An official summary of what happened;
2. A summary of the process used to select the subcontractor and if that process has now been amended;
3. What’s was the responsibility of PG&E in the matter and who in the City made sure that PG&E preformed that responsibility;
4. What were the “:lessons learned” from this project and will they be apllied when it is resumed?

The sewer improvement project on Haight Street is part of a larger project, to be done on Hayes Street, from Market to Stanyan, by the same subcontractor. 

Supervisor Breed, attacking the subcontactor at the press conference, made a reference to “low bid contracts”, a policy followed by the City for well over 50 years.  It was unclear if she meant to change the low bidder system of the City and if so what she would replace it with.  In any case, DPW did , in fact, select the subcontactor and the Supervisor announced no new procedure to be followed by DPW in selecting new subcontactors.

The distressing thing is that some three months after the initial gas line break the spokeswoman for DPW told the Chronicle “We don’t know what caused the breaks”.  This is after DPW stopped work twice on the project to correct errors and restarted it twice!

Merchants along  the Masonic/ Ashbury block  say that DPW seemed uninformed about the location of live gas lines and once they were ruptured provided instructions that contradicted the Fire Department about the need to evacuate the area.  SFPD told both businesses and residents to leave the area, DPW personnel said that it was ok to “shelter in place,” an odd instruction for a potential explosion and fire.

HANC’s October 26th press conference on Haight Street (near the scene of five recent gas leaks), calling  for a hearing at the Board of Supervisors.

Representatives from three other neighborhood organizations--The Alamo Square Neighborhood Association, the Panhandle Residents Organization/Stanyan Fulton, and the North of Panhandle Neighborhood Organization--were present at the presss conference and joined in the call for the public hearing.  The same DPW contract for sewer replacement (with the same subcontractors) is slated for Hayes Street from Market to Stanyan next year and these groups want a commitment that the same thing will not happen with the new project.

At the October 27th Board of Supervisors meeting Supervisor Breed requested that a hearing be held on the Haight Street gas leaks.  Specifically, she requested a hearing:

“to determine specifically what went wrong, how it is being addressed, and what assurance San Franciscans have that such repeated mistakes will not happen again; and requesting Public Works, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, the California Public Utilities Commission, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Ghilotti Brothers, Inc., and Synergy Project Management to report.”

The hearing will be before the Government Audit and Oversight Committee Chaired by Supervisor Yee  of which Sup. Breed is a member.  Our latest information is that the hearing has been scheduled for Thursday, December 3rd, at 10:30 am in City Hall Room 263.