Reporting from San Bruno and Los Angeles — State regulators Sunday ordered Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to inspect its entire natural gas system, as San Bruno residents displaced by Thursday's explosion began returning to their devastated neighborhood and investigators searched for four people still missing and tried to identify the dead.
The California Public Utilities Commission said it will ask PG&E to inspect its sprawling natural gas network, giving priority to high-pressure lines such as the one that exploded in a suburban neighborhood Thursday, killing at least four people and destroying 37 homes.
Commissioners also ordered PG&E to preserve records relating to the explosion and to any work done on the ruptured pipeline, and singled out service performed in September 2010 at the Milpitas terminal. Commission President Michael Peevey said he received a letter from Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado on Saturday requesting the actions. Maldonado has been leading the disaster response while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is in Asia.
PG&E employees and contractors will be interviewed as part of the National Transportation Safety Board's probe. The company's process for investigating leaks will be examined as well as annual budgets to determine how much of the money authorized for leak detection is actually spent, Peevey said in a news release Sunday.
In a statement released late Sunday, PG&E said it would "comply fully with any actions directed by the CPUC." The utility said it had inspected the San Bruno pipeline in March and found no problems.
With the inquiry in its infancy, evacuees began returning to their homes Sunday while others turned to prayer for solace. Around midday, police allowed residents who live at least a block away from the blast epicenter to return home.
Emil Mathews and his wife, Lisa, pulled up to their light-brown tract home, a stone's throw from the destruction zone, a few minutes after search teams with cadaver-sniffing dogs departed.
After looking inside to make sure everything was in place, Emil Mathews put up a ladder and climbed to the roof to view the devastation: home after home reduced to smoldering black piles, a fireplace sticking up here and there. A few houses away, the street looked normal: tidy homes, manicured lawns and unscathed cars lining the curb.
The only nearby clues to Thursday's devastation were a pair of abandoned pink flip-flops, a few singed leaves and a neon-green sticker on the door that read, "lawful residency permitted."
"I feel very blessed," said Lisa Mathews, "but six houses down everything is gone."
Closer to the center of the blast zone, residents gathered near metal barricades and shook hands and hugged, some introducing themselves for the first time. Someone proposed a neighborhood party to get to know one another better and offer support.
"It's funny," said Dennis Costanzo, "now we're getting to know each other. The feuds and all the petty arguments are gone."
The community, residents say, is a friendly one — a middle-class suburb where people buy homes because they are cheaper than in neighboring San Francisco yet offer a reasonable commute. San Bruno has 40,000 residents and is located 12 miles south of downtown San Francisco.
It's not that people didn't know each other before the explosion, neighbors said, but it was like many suburbs: sometimes you say a quick hello to your neighbors, sometimes you fight about little things.
"Something changed here when this happened," said Maria Orrante, who has lived on and off in the neighborhood for 40 years. "People that you haven't seen around the corner for 10, 15 years, now we're all coming together. It's like we're all family."
Inside her mother's home, while she and her husband emptied the kitchen of spoiled potatoes and tuna, Voula Brown talked about the neighborhood. She moved there in 1963, when she was 5 years old.
All of the neighbors from that time are gone now, she said, but the people who moved in next-door helped her elderly mother get out of the home when the fire raged.
Brown walked through the home room by room, looking for damage but finding little.
"Well, I'm...," she said and paused.
"Thrilled," her husband said.
Gary Warren, 63, a retired planner for a semiconductor firm, was among the first of those allowed to return home.
He found utility workers inside turning his gas back on. The phones still worked but the electricity was out, a situation he hoped would change so he and his wife could sleep at home again.
"I'm tired of being on a forced vacation," he said, standing in front of his two-story red house on Estates Drive. "I'm done with being scared.
I was scared for a long time that I'd have no home."
Earlier Sunday, residents filled houses of worship, including the tearful congregation at Bethany Presbyterian Church.
