⏩ Earnings report:

Wine Country fires hurt PG&E’s bottom line.

Shares of PG&E Corp., parent company of the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. utility, sank Thursday as it reported that first-quarter profit was lower than a year ago.

PG&E’s net income for the quarter, which ended March 31, was $442 million (86 cents per share) compared with $576 million ($1.13) for the same quarter in 2017.

Earnings were affected by costs — including those related to the 2017 wildfires and the 2015 Butte fire — totaling $26 million, that were not part of standard operations. Excluding those costs, adjusted earnings came in at 91 cents per share — well below the $1.03 that analysts were expecting.

PG&E also said it had incurred costs of $21 million for legal and other costs associated with deadly wildfires in Northern California last fall. The state has not yet announced what caused the fires, but PG&E is under close scrutiny for how its equipment performed during the windstorm that preceded the fires.

Residents have sued PG&E, and several

counties, including Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino, have filed legal action against the utility in the wake of the wildfires.

CEO Geisha Williams said the company continues to push state policymakers to reconsider “inappropriate application of inverse condemnation.”

Under that legal concept, even if PG&E followed inspection and safety standards, the company could still be on the hook for damages from wildfires if investigators determine that the equipment ignited the flames.

“We’ve been spending a great deal of time educating a lot of stakeholders in the state,” Williams said during the Thursday morning earnings call. “Inverse condemnation is a risk to the financial health” of all of California’s investor-owned utilities.

The company declined to provide a financial outlook for 2018 until there is “better clarity on potential liability” from wildfires that broke out in October 2017.

PG&E’s stock fell more than 3 percent after the release of the earnings report, closing at $44.37. The share price is down by a third over the past year.