PG&E found hundreds of safety risks on equipment

PG&E Corp. said Wednesday its inspectors have found hundreds of “immediate safety risk” problems on its transmission towers and other equipment in recent months, some of them comparable to the flaws that state officials say ignited the Camp Fire last November.

The utility said it has fixed almost all of the problems already.

PG&E officials made the disclosure as they neared completion on an intensive inspection-and-repair program begun earlier this year in response to a 2018 law requiring utilities to improve their wildfire safety records. The utility said it inspected nearly 50,000 transmission towers and other equipment in the high-risk zones of its service territory, far more than usual.

Sumeet Singh, vice president of PG&E’s community wildfire safety program, said inspectors found nearly 100 problems “that we identify as an immediate safety risk or what is deemed as the highest priority” on the transmission towers. They included wornout pieces of hardware, “similar to the wear that we experienced and saw on the C-hook as an example,” he said.

The Camp Fire, which killed 85 people, has been blamed on a flawed PG&E C-hook — a curved piece of metal that holds up wires — on a transmission tower north of Paradise.

Of the nearly 100 problems on transmission towers, Singh said roughly 15 to 20 were discovered on the so-called Caribou Palermo line, the transmission line where the Camp Fire began. PG&E halted electricity flows through the highvoltage line shortly after the November fire and Singh announced Wednesday that it is being permanently retired.

He said inspectors also found serious problems on about 100 substations and nearly 1,000 of its lower-voltage distribution poles throughout the high-risk fire zones. All of the substation flaws have been fixed, and 97 percent of the problems with distribution poles have been repaired, he said.

“While the proportion of high-priority tags is relatively small (compared to the overall system), the number of safety risks found through these inspections was unacceptable,” he said. “We need to do better.”