Suit cites PG&E equipment it claims started deadly blaze
A group of Camp Fire survivors claim in a new lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. to have pinned down how the deadly fire started, blaming the ignition of the blaze on a specific part of one of the utility’s transmission towers in Butte County.
The suit filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court says the unprecedented fire began last month east of Paradise because of a poorly maintained “jumper” extension, which leads wires from one side of a transmission tower to another.
As intense winds blew through the area Nov. 8, an uninsulated jumper cable made contact with the PG&E tower in question, sending “blazing hot molten materials” into dry vegetation and sparking what became California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire, according to the lawsuit.
Attorneys place blame directly on “PG&E’s failure to properly inspect and maintain the tower,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of 34 people who said they lost homes or property in the fire.
The lawsuit does not say why the jumper made contact with the tower, but NBC Bay Area reported that authorities are looking at a steel
hook supporting the extension, citing sources familiar with the investigation.
“PG&E’s entire system is old and decrepit, and instead of inspecting and maintaining it in a prudent fashion, they simply let it run until it fails and then fix it,” said Mike Danko, one of the attorneys involved in the suit. “Most of the time, you get away with that . ... But you don’t get away with it in the situation that we have with the drought and the dry conditions.”
PG&E did not comment on the claims in the suit, instead echoing its previous comments that the safety of the customers and communities it serves are its “highest priority.”
“We are aware of lawsuits regarding the Camp Fire,” spokeswoman Mayra Tostado said in an email. “Right now, our focus is on assessing infrastructure, safely restoring power where possible, and helping our customers recover and rebuild.”
Tostado also stressed that the Camp Fire’s cause is still under investigation.
But speculation has centered around PG&E since the early days of the fire, after the utility told regulators its high-voltage Caribou-Palermo transmission line malfunctioned shortly before the first flames were reported in the area where the blaze reportedly began.
Thursday’s lawsuit includes pictures of the transmission line running through rugged, forested terrain. Five towers on the line near the Camp Fire origin point collapsed because of a winter storm in 2012, the lawsuit notes. The towers were replaced with temporary wooden poles in 2013, and steel towers were not installed until 2016, the suit says.
Fire officials allowed “representatives of affected parties” to access the Camp Fire origin site Nov. 18, when “pieces of insulators and other debris still littered the ground” under the tower in question, according to the lawsuit.
Authorities had removed failed wire sections and the jumper extension, the lawsuit says. A spokesman for the California Department of For-
estry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, declined to comment.
PG&E has also reported another part of its equipment malfunctioned shortly after the fire began, a revelation that has come under scrutiny as Cal Fire investigates a possible second start to the Camp Fire.
Thursday’s lawsuit includes a photo of what it describes as the location of that second outage. The photo appears to show a burned tree lying in front of an orange cone where lawyers say a distribution pole later removed by Cal Fire once stood.
“This outage was caused by the failure of a distribution line, and that failure ignited another blaze that was soon engulfed by and helped fuel the Camp Fire,” the suit says.
PG&E has endured a turbulent ride on Wall Street as its legal and regulatory challenges continue to mount since the Camp Fire broke out. Shares of the utility’s parent company, PG&E Corp., closed Friday at $25.79, nearly half their opening price the day the fire started.
Camp Fire survivors have filed multiple suits against the energy company in San Francisco and Butte County courts, and a federal judge overseeing PG&E’s probation because of the 2010 San Bruno pipeline blast has opened a new, wildfire-related line of inquiry.
At the same time, the California Public Utilities Commission has said it wants to expand an investigation into PG&E’s safety culture, originally born out of the San Bruno fallout, to include wildfires.
The utility also faces the prospect that its equipment may be found responsible for starting last year’s Tubbs Fire, the most destructive of the devastating 2017 Wine Country wildfires. The cause of that fire is still under investigation, but investigators have said PG&E equipment started 17 other fires that burned through Northern California last year.
Dario de Ghetaldi, another attorney representing plaintiffs in the suit filed Thursday, said the cause of the Camp Fire is distinctly clearer than the Tubbs Fire, even one month after this year’s blaze broke out. He noted the “tower out on an exposed ridge” at the origin point, along with the equipment taken by Cal Fire and the regulatory reports from PG&E.
“There’s not a lot of other possibilities,” he said. “I don’t have any doubt.”