PG&E judge probes role of utility in fire
SAN FRANCISCO – A Pacific Gas & Electric troubleshooter spent nearly two hours in federal court Monday fielding questions about whether the beleaguered utility could have turned off the electricity sooner to a power line now suspected of sparking the monstrous Dixie Fire two months ago.
The grilling came before a federal judge who is overseeing PG&E’s criminal probation for a felony conviction after the utility’s gas lines blew up part of a suburban neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2010.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup has hammered PG&E for creating dangers with its fraying equipment, igniting some of the deadliest wildfires in California, causing so much death and destruction during 2017 and 2018 that the company negotiated more than $25 billion in settlements during a 17month bankruptcy that ended last year.
The judge is now weighing whether he can impose more stringent conditions on PG&E before his authority expires when the company’s five-year probation ends in late January.
PG&E “is a convicted felon that poses a safety hazard to California,” Alsup told the utility’s lawyers near the end of Monday’s hearing. “My job is to rehabilitate you and that is what I am going to do until the last minute.”
Alsup and a lawyer from the U.S. attorney’s office spent most of the hearing trying to construct the timeline between when the PG&E troubleshooter first was sent out to a remote area of Butte County where the Dixie Fire is believed to have started and several hours later, when he first smelled smoke.
The identify of the troubleshooter, known as a “troubleman,” was not revealed in court to in help shield him from potential threats.
PG&E acknowledged to California power regulators that a tree leaning on one of its power lines may have started the Dixie Fire, which has scorched nearly 1 million acres to become the second-largest in state history.
The backlash to that initial disclosure, and numerous others in the last decade, prompted PG&E to announce an ambitious plan to spend at least $15 billion to bury about 10,000 miles of its power lines to reduce the chances of its equipment causing more fires.