Damage caused by the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion. Credit: Flickr/Thomas Hawk (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Pacific Gas and Electric Company is a criminal enterprise.
The history of the utility monopoly is marred by catastrophic events that have devastated communities across California. Deadly explosions and massive wildfires abound in PG&E territory. Investigations reveal the real tragedy of California’s disaster complex: these deaths are needless and avoidable.
There are no acts of God in this story. No inscrutable mysteries. The truth is straightforward, and the narrative of our collective recurring nightmare is painfully predictable. Utility companies are legally required to follow safety guidelines. PG&E knowingly and maliciously defies these guidelines to save money. People die. PG&E is convicted. Nobody goes to jail. Judges, legislators, regulators, crying family members all beg PG&E to obey the law. PG&E refuses. People continue dying. PG&E keeps making money. Nothing changes.
Few institutions engage in criminal behavior so publicly and so brazenly.
Despite hundreds of lawsuits, 91 felony convictions, and two bankruptcy filings, PG&E continues to prioritize profits over people. If this homicidal felon is allowed to remain at large, we can expect the next fifteen years to look no different than the last.
2010-2016: San Bruno pipeline explosion
In September 2010, a natural gas pipeline operated by PG&E exploded in the suburban town of San Bruno, California. The explosion was catastrophic, killing eight, injuring many others, and destroying 38 homes. The blast shot a fireball over 1,000 feet into the air, left a 167-foot crater in Glenview Drive, and caused a 1.1 magnitude earthquake.
An investigation revealed that PG&E had committed numerous safety violations leading to the explosion, including poor maintenance and inadequate inspections of its pipeline infrastructure. In 2013, PG&E settled over 70 lawsuits brought by the victims and their families with a $565 million payout; PG&E received $515 million from their insurance policy. In April 2015, the California Public Utilities Commission fined PG&E $1.6 billion for the San Bruno Pipeline explosion. Despite incurring these costs, PG&E continued their pattern of criminal negligence on safety and infrastructure maintenance. This operating strategy devastated Californians across the state in the following decade, but it benefitted one group of people: PG&E shareholders. Between the explosion in 2010 and the fine in 2015, the company raked in $4.9 billion in profits.
The CPUC — purportedly a watchdog against private monopolies which acts in the public interest – helped PG&E evade responsibility for the San Bruno Pipeline Explosion by appointing a more lenient judge to oversee the case at PG&E’s written request. The 2014 Judge Shopping Scandal led to the ouster of three PG&E executives and CPUC President Mike Peevey, after Federal Investigators discovered the illegal collaboration between the monopoly and the regulatory agency. Emails uncovered in the investigation revealed a very close relationship. Claims that the institutions are in bed together are not far off the mark: one PG&E staffer wrote “Love you” to the CPUC President’s Chief of Staff after she gave advice on how to avoid a public information request related to the pipeline explosion.
In 2016, a San Francisco judge found PG&E guilty of six felony charges related to the explosion: five criminal safety violations, and one count of obstruction of justice for lying to federal investigators about their records to hide their crimes. The sentence included a paltry $3 million fine, and a five-year probation period, aimed at rehabilitating the company’s criminal practices. It failed — more on that later.
2017: North Bay Fires
On the evening of Oct. 8, 2017, at 11:08 p.m., a eucalyptus tree near Adobe Canyon Road in Kenwood, Calif., collapsed onto a 12,000-volt pole-mounted electrical distribution line known as Dunbar 1101. Between 2012 and 2017, PG&E conducted seven inspections of the vegetation along the Dunbar 1101 line, and failed to identify the tree as a potential hazard. As the power lines snapped and collapsed onto the ground, two upstream fuses were tripped, cutting power to two-phases of the three-phase circuit, but one fuse failed to operate. Another protective device further upstream of the fuses, Line Recloser 235, went into an alarm condition four times, but also failed to cut power to the circuit. Electricity continued to flow through the downed power line, into the eucalyptus tree, heating it up, and causing it to ignite. Within hours, the fire expanded beyond control.
The Adobe Fire — named after the road near its origin — was not an isolated incident. That same night, winds continued to take down trees; many of them fell on power lines; many of the protective devices serving those power lines failed. Sixteen wildfires began in Northern California on the evening of October 8, 2017. Fifteen of them were found to be caused by PG&E equipment, and were directly linked to safety and maintenance violations. A week later, on Oct. 13, PG&E equipment caused yet another fire.
For three weeks, the firestorms devastated Northern California. Over 100,000 people were evacuated from Santa Rosa, as the Tubbs fire tore through one of North Bay’s most densely populated cities. The Adobe, Norrbom, Parttrick, Pressley, and Oakmont fires all merged into one megafire called the Nuns Fire, which ravaged Napa and Sonoma counties. Eastward, the Atlas Fire set over 50,000 acres of wine country ablaze. Giant plumes of smoke funneled south and settled in the San Francisco Bay, covering the city in an orange haze and causing perhaps the only pre-COVID-19 shortage of N-95 masks in California’s history.
The fires weren’t fully contained until Oct. 31. A burn scar of a quarter-million acres was rent across the state. The estimated cost was $14.5 billion. Almost 9,000 structures were destroyed, and 44 Californians lost their lives in the fires. The North Bay Fires were – at the time – the costliest group of wildfires in history. They did not hold onto that morbid record for long.
2018: Camp Fire
On Nov. 8, 2018 — 13 months to the day after faulty PG&E equipment caused the North Bay Fires — a hook on a high-voltage PG&E transmission line broke, sparking the deadliest and most damaging wildfire in California’s history. The faulty hook was manufactured in 1919 and purchased (along with the whole transmission line) by PG&E in 1930; in 88 years, the company never examined or maintained the hook.
The Camp Fire leveled the towns of Paradise and Concow, as well as much of the outlying areas of Butte County. Over 18,000 structures were destroyed, and 85 people were killed. At $16.7 billion in damages, it remains the costliest wildfire in history, worldwide.
A lengthy investigation found PG&E fully — and criminally — responsible for causing the Camp Fire. Internal documents showed that the company’s operating model for transmission maintenance was to “run to failure.” As the prosecuting attorney put it: “In 1930 PG&E blindly bought a used car. PG&E drove that car until it fell apart.” In June 2020, PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of manslaughter and one count of unlawfully causing a fire.
2019: Lawsuits, bankruptcy and bailout
In the wake of the 2017 North Bay Fires and 2018 Camp Fire, lawsuits against PG&E began to pile up. For 113 years, PG&E had cut costs by neglecting their equipment and reaped the profits. But in 2019, when those costs came back to find them — when thousands of wildfire survivors began demanding that PG&E take responsibility and compensate them for the losses of their property, their health, and their loved ones — PG&E did what any private company would do: they filed for bankruptcy.
The filing allowed PG&E to pause (and reduce) its financial obligations to wildfire victims, creditors, and other claimants while it reorganized its finances under court supervision. During the bankruptcy proceedings, PG&E — despite causing over $30 billion in damages — reached a settlement of only $13.5 billion with wildfire victims of the North Bay Fires and Camp Fire. The settlement structure included 50% of the compensation in PG&E stock, keeping the survivors’ financial recovery chained to the company’s continued profitable operation as an investor-owned utility.
PG&E worked tirelessly to ensure that the financial burden of the settlement would be paid by customers, not by the executives who were responsible for 84 counts of manslaughter, nor the investors who benefitted from their intentional and malicious strategy of corporate negligence. During the bankruptcy proceedings, PG&E appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, requesting that it be allowed to pass on the cost of wildfire liabilities to customers. When the court denied that interpretation of the law, PG&E appealed to its bought-and-paid-for California lawmakers to change the law. They did.
On July 11, 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1054 into law. It was a $21 billion bailout of PG&E. The bill created the California Wildfire Fund — a financial vehicle funded by California taxpayers and utility ratepayers, which exists to reimburse PG&E (as well as San Diego Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison) for wildfire claims. It additionally overturned a longstanding interpretation of California law requiring utilities to bear the burden of proof in establishing that they had acted prudently in order to pass any costs from disasters onto ratepayers; PG&E can now pass wildfire costs onto its customers with no legal obligation to prove that their business practices are safe. $10.5 billion of the $21 billion initial fund was backed by PG&E ratepayers.
The 57-page bill was rushed through the California State Legislature in just two weeks — 14 days full of ex-parte meetings and communications between commissioners, legislators, and PG&E lobbyists. The bill itself was written by a law firm that represented PG&E. Of the 91 lawmakers who voted for the bill, 75 of them had recently accepted campaign donations from PG&E; the utility monopoly spent $548,005 on lawmakers that election cycle, and $208,400 on Gavin Newsom’s campaign in 2018.
In the five years since AB 1054 was passed, PG&E electricity rates have doubled.
2019-2021: Kincade, Zogg and Dixie Fires
In October 2019, a jumper cable on a high-voltage PG&E transmission line broke, igniting the Kincaid Fire, a wildfire that would burn 77,000 acres and 374 structures. The CPUC’s Safety and Enforcement Division conducted an investigation which found that PG&E had failed to properly install the jumper cables, failed to remove abandoned equipment along the transmission line and had abandoned energized equipment along the line, all of which contributed to the malfunction which caused the fire.
On Sept. 27, 2020, a gray pine collapsed onto PG&E overhead transmission lines, sparking the Zogg Fire. Eight-year old Feyla McLeod and her mother Alaina burned alive in their car trying to escape the fire, which took two more lives and 204 buildings. PG&E admitted in court that it had identified the gray pine as a hazard in 2018, but never removed it. After a number of closed-door meetings between PG&E and CPUC, the commission watered down language from its resolution accusing the company of wrongdoing, and agreed to allow PG&E to evade any criminal charges for the fire. PG&E paid a $150 million settlement to the state of California and a $50 million settlement with victims over the Zogg Fire in 2023; PG&E investors, who received $1.8 billion in dividends that year, did not feel the loss.
On July 13, 2021, a 65-foot douglas fir tree fell onto a high-voltage PG&E transmission line. PG&E knew about the fault and continued to energize the line for over nine hours, as it slowly heated up the ground, and ignited flammable materials in the area. Tens of thousands of residents were evacuated in Butte County as the Dixie Fire raged on for almost three months, destroying almost a million acres, killing a firefighter, and causing over $1.5 billion in damages. Following the fire, more than 200 plaintiffs and five counties filed a pair of lawsuits against PG&E. In December 2021, PG&E admitted in regulatory filings that its equipment was likely responsible for the Dixie Fire.
In April 2022, PG&E agreed to pay $55 million to six Northern California counties, to compensate victims of the Kincade and Dixie Fires. Criminal charges in both cases were dropped as part of the settlement agreement. PG&E was additionally required to pay over $20 million in fines over the Kincaid Fire, which were not recoverable through ratepayers.
2022-present: A continuing menace to California
In January 2017, PG&E was placed on a five-year criminal probation following its 2016 felony convictions over the 2010 San Bruno gas pipeline explosion. The probation was intended to rehabilitate PG&E by instituting a corporate culture of safety and by creating court-mandated safety practices which would be monitored and documented.
The courts mandated that PG&E remove all hazard trees within striking distance of PG&E’s lines. Over its five years of probation PG&E did everything it could to shield itself (and its investors) from culpability — it insisted that clearing the hazard trees was impossible, it failed to keep records or in some cases intentionally destroyed records to claim that it did not have knowledge about the hazard trees, it outsourced inspection and maintenance of vegetation around its lines to independent contractors so that it could place the blame on them — it did everything in its power to avoid liability except remove the hazard trees.
As probation came to a close in 2022 U.S. District Judge William Alsup, the overseeing judge, issued a final report, reading in part:
Rehabilitation of a criminal offender remains the paramount goal of probation. During these five years of criminal probation, we have tried hard to rehabilitate PG&E. As the supervising district judge, however, I must acknowledge failure.
While on probation, PG&E has set at least 31 wildfires, burned nearly one and one-half million acres, burned 23,956 structures, and killed 113 Californians. PG&E has pled guilty to 84 manslaughter…
So, in these five years, PG&E has gone on a crime spree and will emerge from probation as a continuing menace to California.
Nine months later, PG&E started the Mosquito Fire in El Dorado County, which burned 77,000 acres and 78 buildings.
The path forward
The disasters outlined above are not accidental. They’re not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are, in fact, the result of exceptionally competent management, which has showered PG&E’s investors in prosperity. Homicidal negligence is the ideal operating model of the investor-owned utility.
In 119 years, no reforms, lawsuits, settlements, fines, or even court-mandated probationary requirements have been able to change PG&E’s criminal behavior. None will.
Our campaign aims to topple PG&E once and for all, and to establish a utility that truly serves the people of California. When we bring down the robber barons of the energy industry and reclaim our power, we can build a safe and sustainable future for California.
