San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
PG&E made to answer at last
It was sordid and stagy, but it made the point about Pacific Gas and Electric’s conduct. Over a half an hour and 85 times, the bankrupt utility’s CEO answered “guilty, your honor” to manslaughter charges linked to California’s deadliest wildfire that reduced the small town of Paradise to cinders.
The utility had promised to plead guilty months ago, making the court appearance this week a formality. But that hardly eased the sickening impact as pictures of each victim flashed on a court screen as PG&E CEO Bill Johnson recited the guilty pleas one by one. Beyond the portraits, the residents died huddled in bath tubs, screaming for help on phones, and stuck in wheelchairs. All because a giant utility neglected safety for profit.
The pleas will result in a wristslap: fines totaling about $3.5 million, making the court appearance more about deserved public shaming as a chapter in corporate neglect winds down. The fines were the maximum allowed under law. As Judge Michael Deems pointedly noted, if the guilty party were a person, instead of a corporation, the sentence “would be 90 years to be served in state prison.”
If the world needed any reminding, the utility’s shameful conduct was detailed in a parallel legal path. Within moments of the guilty pleas in a Chico courtroom, Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey issued his own devastating findings via a grand jury indictment of the company’s role in the
Camp Fire, starting with its costshaving maintenance of power lines that ignited the wildfire and disregard of safety warnings from its employees.
After buying the local power system last century, PG&E did too little upkeep.“In essence, in 1930 PG&E blindly bought a used car. PG&E drove that car until it fell apart,” the grand jury report said.
For decades, aging transmission towers were passed over for repairs and skimpy inspections found little of note. When a clamp failed in high winds and a fallen power line set fire to dry underbrush, the runaway blaze took off. The charges match a string of reports and investigations that have blamed the utility for the fire that destroyed thousands of homes and buildings along with a record death toll.
The summation gives detail and nuance to the saga. But it also provides a small escape hatch for the utility. With no one directly in charge of the longrunning mismanagement, prosecutors declined to pinpoint personal blame. There’s no human face to answer for a monumental tragedy. That hardly means PG&E can turn the page. It remains on probation for the San Bruno pipeline explosion that leveled a neighborhood and killed eight in 2010. Months of court proceedings may let it emerge from bankruptcy tied to the Paradise fire this month. But it will be laden with tens of billions in debt with liabilities totaling $25.5 billion and an obligation to pay $13.5 billion to wildfire victims.
The firm is promising to emphasize safety, a pledge sure to be tested as fire season takes hold. Last year it tried a new idea: cut the power on hot windy days that can spark blazes. But that brought complaints that the company overreacted and shut off juice more widely than needed. It’s also midway along in fulfilling a court directive to spend nearly $3 billion on brush cuts and power line upgrades. Clearly the company has a long way to go to provide power safely and win back a seething public.
There are other sore points. In settling claims with fire victim families, PG&E won’t be paying all cash. It’s offering stock, essentially a bet that the firm will stabilize and prosper. Hedge funds and debt holders are expected to make out handsomely as the company restructures.
Sacramento will need to keep the pressure on this repeat offender. That’s already happening with plans to possibly take over all or part of the utility, though those goals may shrink in a pandemicwrecked economy. Some 16 million customers across Northern California need assurance that a criminal company can operate safely.