San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
PG&E crews on edge, under attack as fire season begins
PARADISE, Butte County — Luke Bellefeuille was born and raised in this town that is now defined by disaster. He learned to fish in the Feather River and to dirt bike in the foothills. As an adult, he could have left behind the area’s isolation and poverty. He stayed.
Bellefeuille, now 38, got a job as a painter, then shifted to hydropower maintenance. He and his girlfriend built a house with a pool in Paradise, moving in during summer 2017. Then, last November, the Camp Fire burned down his home and his hometown.
Bellefeuille, though, said he often wasn’t extended the same sympathy as other victims of the historic blaze that killed 85 people. That’s because he worked for the firm that the state says ignited the fire, Pacific Gas and Elec
tric Co., wearing a uniform with the utility’s logo and driving one of its blue trucks. Bellefeuille and thousands of other line workers became frontline emblems of their employer’s failings.
The Camp Fire intensified a crisis for PG&E, which had already been blamed for causing several disastrous fires in 2017, and employees in the fire zone had to reckon with the immediate fallout. People hurled trash at workers. They spit and yelled. They slashed tires on PG&E trucks and painted “85” — the number of dead — in red on the trucks’ doors, according to a union representative.
“It was our equipment and our fault,” Bellefeuille said. “It’s on PG&E. But there are a lot of upset people who don’t understand that it wasn’t us who started the fire. We are on the ground trying to get the town cleaned up and running.”
In the past year, the huge utility’s inability to stop causing catastrophic wildfires has threatened its existence. Lawsuits piled up, and PG&E’s stock price plunged. Many senior leaders, including the former CEO, have left the company, and the state may force major structural changes.
As another fire season begins, some of PG&E’s 23,000 employees — one of the largest workforces in California — are now on the receiving end of vitriol as they scramble to service power lines and prevent yet another disaster. The controversy at PG&E has dampened workforce morale, a problem that could intensify as the utility expands its controversial strategy of preemptively cutting power when forecasts call for hot and windy weather.
“The people on the front lines don’t make policy,” said Bob Dean, 57, who lived in Paradise for 15 years and is a representative at IBEW Local 1245, which represents about 12,000 PG&E employees. “They just know that, when something bad happens, they have to run and fix it. It’s crushing. PG&E caused the fire, and our guys are taking the blame for PG&E.”
Mary King, PG&E’s vice president of human resources, said she has met with “hundreds” of employees in the field in recent months, and their concerns center around the fire-affected regions.
“While the company is going through challenges and they want to understand it and it’s frustrating for them, what they care about is, ‘Can I provide this service to our local communities?’ ” King said. “They’re the baseball coach. They live down the street. They have deep connections ... and they want to do the work.”
About 3,100 PG&E employees are based in San Francisco, where the company’s headquarters is in a nondescript brick tower downtown. The rest are spread across a service area that covers 70,000 square miles, from Eureka to Bakersfield. They work in fire zones where PG&E often isn’t well received.
The Engineers and Scientists of California Local 20, which represents about 3,700 PG&E workers, heard reports of hateful messages scrawled on PG&E trucks after the Camp Fire, according to John Mader, the union president. Some hotels refused to rent rooms to PG&E workers, and some restaurants wouldn’t serve them, he said.
While PG&E declined to confirm specific incidents, a spokesman said in a statement that the company understands that employees have faced “emotional reactions from the public,” and that it “take(s) our employees’ safety and security very seriously and (has) given them direct phone numbers to law enforcement to call for help.”
Mike Danko, an attorney who represents wildfire victims suing the utility, sympathized with some of the concerns raised by workers.
“I feel bad for those people,” Danko said. He added: “By and large, it’s really management’s responsibility.”
Yet Danko said PG&E leaders have made a point over the years of presenting hardworking staffers in the field as the public faces of the company, featuring them in ads designed to shore up the business’ image.
“Well, it worked,” he said. “And then the face of PG&E was the one who apparently really disappointed everyone. That’s the natural progression.”
In the months after the Camp Fire, Bellefeuille struggled to reckon with working for PG&E. His swimming pool survived the terrible blaze that the utility has acknowledged causing, but nothing else did.
He moved in with his girlfriend and her son in nearby Durham, but for weeks he worked in the Paradise fire zone. When residents were allowed back in early December, he said, some people cried and flipped him off. Some gave him dirty looks and waved. Others said thank you.
“From one end of the spectrum to the other,” he said. “The nicest people to the ones that are angry at the world. It was emotional.”
Since 2017, 122 PG&E workers have lost homes in wildfires, including 89 in the Camp Fire, said King of PG&E.
The Camp Fire was only the latest in a series of tragedies and scandals involving PG&E. In 2010, the rupture of a natural gas pipeline in San Bruno killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes. The incident exposed numerous failings by the utility, which was convicted of six felonies and is still serving a five-year probation sentence.
Legal claims against PG&E recently mounted after it was linked to fires in Wine Country and beyond. When the firm filed for bankruptcy protection in January, it said its wildfire liabilities could exceed $30 billion.
Tom Dalzell, the business manager of IBEW Local 1245, said the last “probably 20 years” have been stressful for workers because of “one crisis after another” that have deteriorated PG&E’s public image — both fairly and not, in his view.
“PG&E gets blamed for everything now because of a combination of fact and fiction in terms of past performance,” he said. “One San Bruno goes a long way toward undermining public confidence . ... People are worried. They don’t want to live in perpetual crisis.”
Worker morale took another hit in February, when company leaders backed off a plan to seek Bankruptcy Court approval for $130 million in 2018 performance bonuses. Attorneys for PG&E had said in court papers that 14,000 staffers were eligible for the payments. None was a senior executive.
The company and union leaders said the money, awarded through the company’s shortterm incentive program, was a standard part of compensation for many people at PG&E.
But consumer advocates and attorneys for fire victims lambasted the proposal. On Feb. 22, the company canceled the plan, with the interim CEO saying it was “not the right thing to do.” For PG&E workers, the move hurt. “In general, people were really upset,” Mader said.
About 1,200 of the engineers union members receive the bonuses — including Mader, a distribution engineer in Sacramento who started at PG&E as an intern in 1997. Before February, attrition within the union was already up 20% year over year, and Mader thinks that figure could worsen.
The utility, too, was concerned it would see “significant attrition” after the Camp Fire, and when it chose not to award the 2018 incentive payments, King said. So far, however, it is on track for only a slight increase of departures based on its five-year average, she said.
Recruiting for full-time positions has faced some challenges since PG&E entered bankruptcy, she said.
“It’s taking us a little longer to find talent, but I think that we are making progress in that area, and we’re stabilizing,” she said. “People see a path forward, and that helps with recruiting.”
To cut the risk of power lines igniting another deadly fire, the company is stepping up defensive efforts: trimming more trees that could fall into wires, ramping up equipment inspections, and installing weather stations and high-definition cameras in danger areas. What has many workers worried is the expanded plan for preemptive power shutdowns during hot and windy weather — the type that PG&E put into place this weekend in parts of the North Bay.
“It’s going to be unprecedented, the amount of shutdowns,” Mader said. “I am very concerned that PG&E employees are going to get blamed. At the same time, the company is going to have to shut down the power for public safety purposes.”
Employees felt the heat last year, Dalzell said, when PG&E intentionally turned off power in some areas as a fire-prevention measure for the first time. The inaugural effort was widely criticized by leaders and residents, largely because of communication concerns.
“It was vicious,” Dalzell said. “I don’t know whether any employee is going to be able to work alone during those events.”
King acknowledged that public scrutiny had created a “tough situation” for PG&E workers, but stressed that “the vast majority” of customers are “very appreciative and supportive” of the utility.
“They know the employees are there to help,” she said.
Future changes could rattle the workforce further. PG&E must be restructured to exit bankruptcy, and state regulators are looking into whether it needs a major shakeup. Among the possibilities: a sell-off of all or part of the natural gas business, and a government takeover in some areas. San Francisco is exploring whether to try this step.
Dalzell said neither option would be good for his members, citing the transferability of retirement benefits.
No matter the outcome of the bankruptcy crisis, some of the company’s fiercest critics and many employees agree it has a long way left to go to regain customers’ trust.
“I don’t think that messaging is the answer,” Dalzell said. “Performance is the answer.”
That could take time. Employees like Bellefeuille continue to question their role in the company. In February, he took an extended leave to partner with a friend who runs a construction company. They’re working together to help clear lots in Paradise, including the one belonging to Bellefeuille.
“I plan on going back to PG&E,” he said. “I know the lot clearing won’t last forever. I don’t know. I’m keeping an open mind. I don’t have the benefits or retirement account that I did. I took a pay cut to do this work. But there is more to life than that, I think. People told me I was crazy to leave, but you have to follow your heart. Paradise is all I know, and I want to help rebuild it.”
Lizzie Johnson and J.D. Morris are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: ljohnson@ sfchronicle.com, jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LizzieJohnsonnn, @thejdmorris