PG&E pleads guilty to manslaughter in ’18 fire
The country’s largest utility pleaded guilty Tuesday to 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter stemming from the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history.
Pacific Gas & Electric acknowledged its neglected equipment set off the fire that destroyed most of the Northern California town of Paradise in 2018. The Camp Fire claimed the lives of 85 people, but prosecutors weren’t sure they could establish one of the deaths was the company’s fault. The blaze burned more than 153,000 acres.
At Tuesday’s hearing in superior court in Butte County, where what’s left of Paradise is located, Judge Michael Deems recited the 84 counts one by one as photos of the victims were displayed in the courtroom.
Looking directly at the photos, PG&E CEO Bill Johnson repeatedly answered, “Guilty, your honor” to the charges. Johnson addressed the court and acknowledged nothing he could say would lessen the anguish from the blaze the company ignited.
“I sincerely hope that the actions we’re taking today will help bring some measure of peace,” Johnson said. “I wish there was some way to take back what happened or to take away the impact, the pain that these people suffered. But I know that can’t be done.”
PG&E is approaching the end of a complicated bankruptcy case it used to work out $25.5 billion in settlements to pay for the damages from the Camp Fire and others that charred wide swaths of Northern California and killed dozens of people in 2017.
The bankruptcy deals include $13.5 billion earmarked for wildfire victims. A federal judge will decide whether to approve PG&E’s plan for getting out of bankruptcy by June 30.
“We want this to be impactful because this can’t go on any longer,” Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey told The Associated Press.
“There is going to have to be a sea change in PG&E’s method of operation.”
Some of those changes have begun before what’s likely to be an intense fire season, following a winter and early spring with below-average precipitation.
PG&E crews have been replacing old power poles with more resilient ones less prone to toppling in heavy winds. The company undergrounded some electrical lines, cleared flammable vegetation near its equipment and increased its use of fire-monitoring technology.
PG&E officials said they will still have to rely on the highly unpopular preventive power shutoffs they unveiled last year under certain weather conditions, albeit on a reduced, more-tailored scale.
The company said it altered its corporate culture and refocused on the safety of its 16 million customers.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who supervises PG&E’s five-year probation for an explosion in its natural gas lines that killed eight people in 2010 in a San Francisco suburb, has been highly critical of the utility for failing to take more measures to make its grid safer.
PG&E will plead to one felony count of unlawfully causing a fire. No executives will be charged, so no one will be imprisoned. PG&E instead will pay a maximum fine of $3.5 million in addition to $500,000 to cover the county’s costs of the criminal investigation.