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A high-pressure natural gas transmission line owned by Pacific Gas and Electric ruptured beneath a residential street in San Bruno, California, on the evening of Sept. 9, 2010, feeding a fire that killed eight people and burned dozens of homes in the city's Crestmoor neighborhood, according to federal investigators.

The line failed at about 6:11 p.m. local time, and the escaping gas ignited almost immediately, throwing up a towering column of fire that witnesses said was visible for miles. Residents and arriving crews first believed a jetliner from nearby San Francisco International Airport had crashed, and initial emergency traffic described a possible plane down, according to news reports and the National Transportation Safety Board's review of the response.

The recording archived with this post is not a single 911 call. It is roughly an hour of multi-channel emergency radio traffic, captured off a public safety scanner as San Bruno fire and police units and mutual-aid companies responded. Dispatchers and field units can be heard gauging the size of the fire, calling for additional alarms and water supply, and coordinating evacuations across several talk groups.

The ruptured segment was part of Line 132, a 30-inch steel transmission pipe installed in 1956. In a report adopted in August 2011, the NTSB concluded the section had been assembled from short lengths of pipe joined by a defective, poorly welded seam that PG&E's records had never accurately reflected. Investigators faulted the utility's integrity-management and recordkeeping programs and found that state and federal regulators had exercised inadequate oversight.

The blast and fire killed Jacqueline Greig, 44, an analyst for the California Public Utilities Commission, and her 13-year-old daughter, Janessa; Jessica Morales, 20; Elizabeth Torres, 81; James Franco, 58; and three members of the Bullis family, Lavonne, 82, her son Greg, 50, and his son Will, 17. Fifty-eight people were injured and 38 homes were destroyed.

The utilities commission fined PG&E $1.6 billion in April 2015, among the largest penalties the regulator had imposed on a utility. In August 2016, a federal jury in San Francisco convicted the company of six felonies, five counts of violating the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act and one count of obstructing the NTSB investigation by misleading investigators about how it had screened its pipelines for risk.

U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson sentenced PG&E on Jan. 26, 2017, to the statutory maximum fine of $3 million, five years of probation under an independent monitor and 10,000 hours of community service. The company was also ordered to spend up to $3 million on an advertising campaign publicizing its convictions.