PG&E: Someone else’s wires may have sparked huge blaze
The deadliest and most destructive of last month’s Wine Country wildfires may have been started by electrical equipment not owned or installed by Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the utility said in a legal filing Thursday.
The filing states that while California fire investigators are still trying to determine the cause of the Tubbs Fire, which destroyed entire neighborhoods of Santa Rosa, “preliminary investigations suggest that this fire might have been caused by electrical equipment that was owned, installed and maintained by a third party.”
A spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, said he did not know the source of PG&E’s information.
The filing, which comes in response to several wildfire-related lawsuits against PG&E, gives no supporting evidence for the claim other than referring to an electric incident report that the utility submitted to state regulators in the wake
of the fires.
The report, released to the public last week, described Cal Fire investigators taking possession of customer-owned overhead lines on a property near Calistoga. Although the exact address was redacted from the incident report by the California Public Utilities Commission, PG&E’s filing Thursday describes it as being near where the Tubbs Fire began.
A PG&E spokesman declined to elaborate on the filing’s assertion, noting that Cal Fire’s investigation is still under way.
“Our motion speaks for itself,” spokesman Keith Stephens said.
Cal Fire has said it is examining whether PG&E’s power lines may have played a role in starting the many fires that erupted during a fierce windstorm on Oct. 8.
Cal Fire officials said Thursday that they would not comment on any of their investigations. As of Wednesday, 28 investigators continued working to determine the cause of the wildfires in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and Yuba counties, said Deputy Chief Scott McLean, a Cal Fire spokesman.
“We have not released any information to anybody,” McLean said. “Our investigations are ours, and I’m not sure what PG&E is talking about.”
Cal Fire officials said they don’t expect to release a cause of any of the fires anytime soon. Investigations often take months or more than a year to wrap up.
“We want to make sure we get the job done right,” McLean said.
October’s wildfires, which included blazes in the Sierra foothills and Orange County, caused more than $3.3 billion in damage, according to an estimate from the state’s insurance commissioner. California utilities can be held liable for economic damages from wildfires caused by their equipment, even if they followed all applicable safety regulations.
Most of PG&E’s filing argues against a move by attorneys who have sued the company over the Oct. 8 wildfires to consolidate their separate lawsuits into one proceeding in San Francisco. Instead, PG&E argues that there should be separate suits based on the location of each fire concerned. All plaintiffs affected by the Atlas Peak Fire, for example, would be part of a single proceeding, while those affected by the Tubbs Fire would be in a separate proceeding.
PG&E submitted the filing to the Judicial Council of California, asking the council’s chair to coordinate the suits into five separate proceedings based on location. The council, the policy-making body for California’s court system, has the authority to coordinate proceedings in complex cases.
Cal Fire investigators have been at the scene of a possible point of origin for the Tubbs Fire on a hillside along Bennett Lane just off Highway 128 in Calistoga.
Several neighbors reported seeing the fire spark around 9:45 p.m. on Oct. 8 before the flames raced west toward Sonoma County on their way to killing 22 people and destroying thousands of structures. The fire has been termed the most destructive in state history.
A Chronicle reporter and photographer visited the site last month. Much of it was encircled by yellow crime tape and monitored by a private security guard. Investigators walked up and down a steep driveway next to small colored stake flags that marked the fire’s burn patterns farther down on the hill.
Two guards at the bottom of the driveway would not give a Chronicle photographer access to the site Thursday night.