The California Public Utilities Commission has abruptly fired a state lawyer who was pressing Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to account for which gas pipelines it failed to test before the San Bruno disaster, The Chronicle has learned.

Robert Cagen was one of the commission's lead attorneys in a regulatory case against PG&E that could result in $2.5 billion in fines and penalties for violations related to the 2010 natural-gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno.

Cagen was fired one day after the commission's legal staff backed away from his effort to make PG&E account for which lines it tested with high-pressure water before the September 2010 explosion.

Sources said Cagen was fired after he protested the decision. PG&E attorneys have resisted turning over the information and recently warned that doing so could further delay a resolution of the long-pending regulatory case.

Cagen declined to comment about his status Friday. A spokesman with the utilities commission declined to comment, calling it a personnel matter.

Critics of the commission said the dismissal of Cagen - who had a 35-year track record of handling regulatory cases with the agency - was the latest evidence that the agency is overly cozy with the utility it regulates.

"Bob Cagen is a dedicated public servant who we believe held the public interest in safety as a highest priority," said Connie Jackson, San Bruno's city manager. "We think he did a great job. This is absolutely ridiculous."

She added, "The city continues to be very concerned about the dysfunction of the CPUC - that is an alarming and frustrating situation for the city of San Bruno and the victims."

Long delay

Harvey Morris, another staff attorney with the utilities commission, said in an e-mail Thursday to the administrative law judge hearing the records case that state lawyers had dropped the effort to obtain PG&E's pre-blast testing data to avoid a long delay.

PG&E said that if it turned over the information, further hearings "would be inevitable" so the company could explain the documents, Morris said.

Morris said the commission believes its case against PG&E is already strong, and that dropping the effort to get testing totals did not amount to "backtracking on its positions in its briefs that PG&E's record-keeping practices were so poor as to make the operations of its system unsafe."

Key to state's case

The issue of how vigorously PG&E kept track of and tested its gas transmission pipelines is crucial to the state's record-keeping case, which is before administrative law judge Amy Yip-Kikugawa.

Among the accusations against PG&E is that it conducted minimal water-pressure testing on its 6,000-plus-mile pipeline system. Such tests are considered reliable for detecting the kind of problem that caused the San Bruno explosion, an incomplete seam weld.

The mileage of untested lines could affect the size of the fine against PG&E.

The dispute over testing records dates to July 2012, when state regulators asked PG&E to reveal which lines it had tested and which it had not. The company said it didn't know because it lacked records on 23,761 segments of its system, covering more than 435 miles, but added that it was not done looking.

Lawyers with the commission's safety division then formally accused PG&E of violating state and federal laws that require utilities to keep such records for the service life of a pipeline.

In response, the company told the administrative law judge in March 2013 that it "has not given up looking for these records and still hopes to find them."

Last month, safety division attorneys led by Cagen raised the issue again in a data request, similar to the discovery process in a criminal or civil case in court.

This time, PG&E rejected the request, saying the evidence-gathering phase of the case was closed. Company spokesman Greg Snapper said in an interview that PG&E had told commission lawyers the information they sought was "out there" in various public documents.

The state's lawyers then filed a motion with the administrative law judge, demanding that the company be ordered to reveal which records it had found since 2012, to "assess the veracity of PG&E's defense."

Out of retirement

Cagen was retired but brought back to the commission's legal staff to handle cases involving PG&E after the San Bruno blast.

He has clashed with utilities commission management before. In June 2013, he and several other safety-division attorneys disagreed with a management recommendation that PG&E not be fined for the San Bruno explosion, and were briefly removed from the case.

They were reinstated after the dispute became public, and the commission agreed to pursue fines.