Report triggers PG&E selloff Embattled utility is found at fault in October’s Nevada and Butte county wildfires
PG&E shares nose-dived Tuesday, the first trading day after state fire investigators revealed that the embattled utility’s power lines had sparked four blazes in Nevada and Butte counties in October.
The unsettling disclosure from Cal Fire was the result of probes that are unrelated to investigations into the lethal Wine Country infernos and any role the company’s equipment might have had in the lethal — and far larger — conflagrations that scorched the Wine Country during the same month of October.
Plus, nearly 200 lawsuits have been filed against PG&E in connection with the Wine Country infernos, PG&E said in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
“As of May 25, 2018, the utility has received approximately 175 complaints on behalf of at least 2,500 plaintiffs related to the October 2017 wildfires,” PG&E said in the filing.
The cases are being coordinated through the San Francisco Superior Court, PG&E said.
“The coordinated litigation is in the early stages of discovery,” PG&E said.
Multiple theories of litigation are in play, PG&E said, including negligence and California’s policy of allowing inverse condemnation to determine liability.
PG&E executives have vowed to wage a multifront battle to upend rules that now make it harder to pass the costs of wildfire liabilities along to customers in the form of higher monthly energy bills.
San Francisco-based PG&E’s shares plummeted 5.2 percent and finished at $42.34 Tuesday. The company’s shares rallied slightly in after-hours trades.
PG&E’s chief executive officer, Geisha Williams, asserted during a conference call with analysts on May 3 that it would scour all legal, regulatory and political venues in a quest to ease any financial burdens connected with the infernos and shift those responsibilities to ratepayers.
“Under inverse condemnation, the utility could be strictly liable for property damages and attorneys’ fees if its equipment was a substantial cause of a fire, even if the Utility followed established inspection and safety rules,” PG&E said in Tuesday’s SEC filing.
PG&E executives believe more wildfires are likely due to climate change, and suggested during a conference call with analysts Thursday that a “new normal” of destructive infernos confronts the utility and California.
“There is no simple fix,” Williams said. “The new normal needs new solutions.”
However, in a previous interview, state Sen. Jerry
Hill, whose district includes portions of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, criticized PG&E harshly for its efforts. Hill also represents San Bruno, site of a fatal explosion in 2010 that resulted primarily from PG&E’s shoddy maintenance and flawed record-keeping.
Hill said May 3 that PG&E’s effort to downplay its responsibilities in a disaster stirs echoes of the
company’s efforts to deflect responsibility in the wake of the gas pipeline explosion that killed eight people and destroyed a San Bruno neighborhood.
“PG&E is trying to change the conversation and the narrative from negligence and their possible responsibility and call all of it the new normal,” he said. “There is nothing new about PG&E’s negligence. We saw it eight years ago in San Bruno.”