The deadly 2010 gas pipeline explosion in the San Bruno neighborhood is sparking an intriguing intergovernmental agency battle. It comes in the form of a lawsuit filed by the city of San Francisco in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. It alleges that an outright failure by federal pipeline safety regulators to do their job is putting San Franciscans at risk of more catastrophic death and injury accidents in the future.

The suit, filed Tuesday, claims that the little-known U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration "abjectly failed" to enforce laws ahead of and after the 2010 San Bruno natural gas line disaster. Eight people died and 38 homes were leveled. The suit asks the court to force the tiny PHMSA to fulfill its function. It accuses the agency of tending to leave the heavy lifting on pipeline safety regulation to state agencies like the California Public Utilities Commission.

According to the suit, the PHMSA has never even set standards by which the state agencies would be able to gauge whether utility companies are in compliance with federal safety rules. The result, it says, is that enforcement has become scant. The suit asks the court to order the federal regulators to finally set those standards.

The city's suit appears to effectively be trying to leverage the federal government against itself. The claims in the suit parrot conclusions drawn by the National Transportation Safety Board after its investigation of the San Bruno blast. The official NTSB report said that PG&E had "exploited weaknesses in a lax system of oversight, and regulatory agencies that placed a blind trust in operators to the detriment of public safety." It encouraged the PHMSA to tighten up its rules on line operators.

PHMSA's response to all this is a no comment, but it says it is committed to the safety it is mandated to protect. PG&E also has had no comment on the suit, except to note the safety improvement efforts it has undertaken since the 2010 explosion.

Source: SFGate.com, "S.F. sues to force feds to improve pipeline safety," Jaxon Van Derbeken, Feb. 15, 2012