Door cam video reviewed by NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit calls into question what a PGE repair crew told investigators about contacting nearby residents before the December explosion of a home near Hayward. “We don’t know anything,” said Brittany Maldonado, whose door-cam video captur ed the moment a home across from hers exploded, injuring six people, on Dec. 11. She says in the weeks since the explosion, she and her neighbors have been living in limbo, waiting to learn what happened and why. The video is not only a key piece of evidence as to what happened, it also captures the activity on the street in the more than two hours before hand. It shows when PGE’s crew arrived at 7:48 a.m. and when the fire crew arrived three minutes later. It even recorded when PGE brought in a portable toilet tor the crew to use at 8:24 a.m., more than an hour before the 9:37 a.m. explosion. But Maldonado says there’s one thing the video doesn’t show: Anyone from PGE coming to her door or urging her to evacuate. “You didn’t knock on my door — just own it,” Maldonado said in a recent interview. “Say: ‘okay, we didn’t knock on this door.’’’ But in the NTSB preliminary report, investigators say PGE’s crew told them that crew went to the door of four homes, including Maldonado’s, before the explosion that morning, to contact residents about the gas leak. But no one answered. The owners of the home hit by the blast said they don’t know whether anyone tried to alert their tenants, who are still traumatized by the blast. They say PGE should have alerted people in the neighborhood. “If you haven’t been told there’s a gas leak, you’re going to go about your life and you’re going to turn on things,” said Debbie Waltmire, whose mother Angela Plowman owns the home that exploded as well as other nearby structures. In fact, the Maldonado video shows that rather than anyone knocking, the PGE technician walks right by her door while heading for the meter alongside her home. It also shows Maldonado going outside to ask the utility worker about what’s going on. Maldonado says that even when she confronted the worker, he never mentioned a leak, just that there was a problem with the construction work across the street and had to turn off her gas. Hayward Feb 10 Owners say surviving tenants still traumatized from home explosion near Hayward Hayward Dec 26, 2025 Prior gas leak near Hayward blamed on same contractor tied to leak before home explosion Hayward Dec 15, 2025 Community continues to recover after explosion near Hayward PGE has referred questions about the case to the NTSB, which declined to comment for this story. A veteran former NTSB investigator — who investigated the San Bruno gas line explosion in 2010 – reviewed the video for the investigative unit. He says it raises many questions, especially about the PGE crew’s version of events. “It’s a big red flag for me,” said Ravi Chhatre, who is now a consultant on gas safety issues. He questioned why the PGE crew allowed cars to drive next to a leak. As vehicles streamed by, it turns out, investigators say gas was seeping through the ground for more than two hours. Chhatre says that, as luck would have it, no traffic was passing when the explosion happened. “That was mind-boggling to me,” Chhatre said. “I mean, talk about luck. I looked at that frame when the explosion happened. That is the only time when there were no cars on the street.” Under the circumstances, he said, it was a miracle the accident wasn’t much worse. “We are really lucky in this case that nobody got hurt bad and there was no loss of life that I know of — but we shouldn’t be counting on luck all the time,” Chhatre said. Maldonado says she hopes the NTSB’s findings will prevent another nightmare in the future. “Let us know this is what happened, like this is how we should have handled it, this is what should have been done, this wasn’t done — give it to us, like straight to the point.” The final report will not be out, the board investigators say, for several months. ...read more read less